A 

Window 
in Arcady 


Charles 

Francis 

Saunders 



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A Window in Arcady 





































































A Sequestered Meadow 






A Window in Arcady 

A Quiet Countryside Chronicle 


by 

Charles Francis Saunders 

Author of “In a Poppy Garden,” Etc. 


Illustrated from 

Photographs by Henry Troth 


11 It were happy if we studied nature more in natural things . . . the 
world wearing the mark of its Maker , whose stamp is everywhere 
visible and the characters very legible to the children of Wisdom." 

• , , —William Penn. 


Philadelphia 
The Biddle Press 
1911 


'i- 



QH8I 
• S3 


This simple chronicle of a nature lover’s observations in 
southeastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey, 
is compiled from contributions to The Philadelphia 
Record and The Churchman , by the courtesy of 
whose publishers the present publication is allowed. 



Transferred from the Library 
of Congress to D. C-,Publlc 
Library for use%*2y3qbin under 
Sec. 59, Copyright a, w, 1909. 



By Transfer 

D. C. Public Library Copyright, 1911 

FEB 2 6 1998 The Biddle Press 


©Cl. A 30 0158 

hn- " 


L. C. TR. flOV 1 5 1911 Mfz*/? <ye>4r' 


WITHDRAWN 

1.S0231 




To the Memory of 
the Dear Companion who shared with 
me these Arcadian paths. 

My Wife 






















LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 


Opposite Page 

A Sequestered Meadow ( Frontispiece ) 

The Monotone of Winter Fields.12 

A Haunt of the Wild Smilax.18 

Willows and Alders.23 

The Meadow Brook in March.28 

Croziers of the Ferns .34 

A May Meadow.42 

The River’s Lower Reaches.49 

A Roadside of June.58 

Where Water Lilies Sleep.72 

The Summer’s Heart.77 

Osmunda Ferns.83 

A Pond in the Pine Barrens.88 

The Riverside’s Tangle.95 

A Pine Barrens Stream .99 

An October Wayside.107 

A Hemlock Slope.11 5 

By the Winter Sea.123 





















JANUARY 















Flora’s Firstlings 


January 20 . —Through all the wintry weather our 
kind Mother Nature keeps up a little conservatory in the 
woods, where anybody, at the cost of a tramp through the 
snow, may gratify the craving of his nature for a bit of 
green in winter, and may gather posies of refreshment. 
In shaded, springy pockets of the hills the strengthening 
sun has already lured a few skunk cabbage blossoms out. 
The pretty shells mottled in green and purple, peeping 
above the muck and brown leaves of their boggy home, are 
grateful reminders of the flight of winter—nature’s modest 
dials whereby the observant rambler may see how the 
world wags. They are out unusually early this year, 
but one must be cautious about accepting them as signs 
of an early spring. 

In verdant mats the cheerful chickweed grows every¬ 
where—in the fields and in the yards, but it is most lux¬ 
uriant, just now, in damp spots on the southern fold of 
some slope that dips to a brook. Like the dandelion, which 
has been found in our latitude in bloom during every 
month in the year, the chickw T eed quite frequently expands 
its flowers in midwinter, and even sets seeds. It is a type 
of the sanguine nature among men; it trusts the sunshine 
and the south wind, and, whatever to-morrow may have 
in store, to-day it will be merry. It is a plant almost 
world-wide in its distribution, and, humble as it is, it is 
worthy of more than our passing notice. It has a habit 
of folding its leaves together on the approach of night or 
when clouds gather, and of expanding them again with 
the return of the light. On this account it has acquired 
in the Old World some reputation as a weather prophet, 


[ 11 ] 


A Window in Arcady 


and there is a proverb to the effect that if the chickweed 
shuts up then the traveler should put on his great coat. 
The plant is reputed to be a fair substitute for spinach and 
greens, but the principal use that our people make of it 
nowadays is to take it home for a salad for Dick, the 
canary. 

Among the meagre delicacies of the winter fields is one 
in which pussy has particular interest, namely catnip. The 
hard frosts of autumn apparently kill this plant, but if we 
examine the bases of the dry stalks in winter we shall 
find, particularly if the situation is a somewhat protected 
one, that clusters of young shoots have sprung up about 
them. These grow a little during the mild spells of 
weather and are very tender and juicy, being apparently as 
grateful to the feline palate as the delicate yellow and 
white heart of a lettuce-head is to the human taste. Cats, 
however, are not singular in their liking for this aromatic 
herb, which is pleasant munching for a man, too, and 
with the old-fashioned country housewives is one of the 
most prized of “simples.” 

January 26 . —All winter long by the roadsides and in 
old fields the dry stalks of the milkweed stand, holding 
aloft their burst pods for the winds to empty. The packing 
of the seeds in these pods is a marvel of neatness. Round, 
brown and flat, they overlap one another like scales on a 
fish, and the long, silken hairs that spring in a tuft from 
the summit of each seed and have gained for the plant in 
some districts the name of wild cotton, are drawn tightly 
upward in a compact, white cone that fits snugly in the 
taper end of the pod. As the seeds are loosened by the 
[ 12 ] 


The Monotone of Winter Fields 


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Winter Fields 


wind these hairy tufts spread out and bear the seeds as on 
wings long distances away from the place of their birth; 
so does the milkweed colonize the earth. It has an aristo¬ 
cratic cousin which is found occasionally in thickets and 
is distinguished by its climbing habit. A clump of bram¬ 
bles whereon this slender vine has clambered is dotted 
jvhite, these midwinter days, with the opening pods, out 
of which the silken-haired seeds are only now escaping. 
These seed vessels of the climbing milkweed, which are 
covered with short spines, are very picturesque, being 
smaller and more delicate than those of the plebeian milk¬ 
weed of the roadside. Before the beating of the elements 
has bleached them they are tinted in beautiful tones of 
green, brown and yellow, reminding one of shells from 
some tropic sea. 

The gray monotone of winter fields is often exquisitely 
relieved by growths of Indian grass, which delights in 
sandy, sterile stretches of ground throughout our vicinity. 
There are several species of it, but in winter all look 
practically alike—tall, rank grasses, dried and rustling, 
but retaining in culm and leaf the warm, reddish yellow 
of ripened wheat. On a sunny January day as they bend 
before the rush of the north wind, they fairly bewilder the 
eye with their resemblance to a waiting harvest touched 
by the summer breeze. One wonders if the birds hunting 
for winter provender are ever deceived by the sight in the 
hope of a feast of grain. Like the hungry beggar of Bag¬ 
dad, however, who dined with the Barmecide in the Ara¬ 
bian Nights, one finds here only a feast for the imagina¬ 
tion, for the seeds that came with the autumn are long since 
scattered abroad. 


[ 13 ] 






FEBRUARY 


A Window in Arcady 


February 22 .—One of my midwinter pleasures is 
going berrying. Upon one of the February holidays where¬ 
with a kindly Legislature has so bountifully blessed us, 
if a man will wrap his ulster about him and fare forth to 
the nearest bog in the pines, he will be rewarded with 
treasure of berries of many sorts and hues. Here will 
be found, its blushing honors still thick upon it, the cheer¬ 
ful tree which contributes so important a part to the 
decorations of Christmas—the evergreen holly, prickly of 
leaf and crimson of berry. Growing everywhere about 
the swamp’s edge are other sorts of holly, too, the most 
abundant being the smooth ilex, or inkberry, whose glossy 
foliage is so much prized by collectors of winter greenery 
that the gathering of it for shipment to the cities is a 
considerable industry. Its trim little bushes often cover 
hundreds of acres and vary in height from a foot or two 
in the open to six or eight feet in the swamps. In the latter 
situation it is a beautiful, slender shrub, particularly attrac¬ 
tive in winter, when the absence of leaf from most of its 
neighbors makes its shining evergreen the more noticeable. 
It bears a profusion of jet black berries, like bright, beady 
eyes, amid the leaves, or, to speak more prosaicly, like 
shoebuttons. They are worth tasting, so as to learn how 
bitter and astringent a pretty black berry can be, but once 
in a lifetime is enough. 

Another slip of a holly in the swamp is the deciduous 
ilex commonly known as the winterberry, because of the 
abundance of bright red berries which line its bare branches 
most of the winter. In February they look decidedly the 
worse for the wear, and such of them as now remain on 


[16] 


February Berries 

the bushes at all are more or less discolored to an apoplec¬ 
tic purple or a lifeless brown. 

All about our feet as we skirt the border of the swamp 
are pigmy plants of wintergreen, fruitful with the familiar 
red, spicy berries, which we like to buy at a cent or two a 
glass from the Italian fruit venders on the city streets. 
It is almost worth a half-day’s trip to see these berry-laden 
bushes, two or three inches high, which are the embodi¬ 
ment of sturdy endurance. The cold empurples their 
foliage as it reddens a man’s skin, but they do not yield a 
leaf to its blustering. 

Picking our way from hummock to hummock over the 
treacherous ice of the swamp, we come upon other berry 
treasures—the witherod’s bunches of plum-purple fruit, 
the exact color of Concord grapes. The berries are 
shriveled now, like raisins, but, unlike raisins, are void 
of meat or taste; yet their rich color is a feast to the eye. 
Here, too, are the fragrant bushes of the bayberry, on 
some of which we shall find the little white waxy balls 
which old-time folk used to boil for the sake of a tallow¬ 
like extract so obtained, and which is a less resourceful 
age than this, was serviceable in candle making. Clamber¬ 
ing over high bushes and clinging to the lower limbs of 
trees are vines of smilax—not the miscalled smilax of the 
florist shops, but the honest, simon-pure smilax of Father 
Linnaeus. The neighborhood of some of our swamps will 
yield three or four varieties of it. Usually they bear 
clusters of black or blue-black berries which persist nearly 
until spring, but are inedible from a human standpoint. 
There is one of our species, however, whose berries are a 


[17] 


A Window in Arcady 

vivid scarlet color and are rather palatable in their mellow 
old age, being mealy and with a slightly sweet taste. 

Perhaps the finest of our smilaxes is the laurel-leaved 
which is found in the swamps of the pine barrens and 
southward along the coast. A beautiful evergreen vine, 
with elliptical, rather unctuous leaves, smooth and plea¬ 
sant to the touch as Russia leather, it loves to climb by 
its abundant tendrils far up into the trees, where the 
graceful ends hang down like curls for Boreas when in 
playful mood to run his fingers through. It bears an 
abundance of berries in spherical bunches, which require 
the sun of two seasons to ripen them, and those which we 
now find on the vines are accordingly green and imma¬ 
ture—infants exposed remorselessly to the winter’s worst. 
One grows very fond of this sturdy, cheery vine and when 
passing a thicket where it grows likes always to step in 
and stroke its glossy leafage as one strokes a favorite cat. 

Along fence rows and in thickets a pretty sight is offered 
by the vines of the round-leaved smilax or greenbriar. 
Its stout green stems, destitute of leaves at this season and 
armed with strong, wicked thorns, form impenetrable 
tangles which are attractive now with bunches of plump 
black berries swinging by slender stalks. The stems of 
this vine are curious in that, instead of being: round, they 
are frequently quadrangular—a most unusual shape for a 
plant stem. More attractive is the glaucous wild smilax, 
whose stems are slenderer than those of the greenbriar, 
and are covered with a delicate, frosty bloom, which, when 
removed by the finger, discloses a purplish ground beau¬ 
tifully mottled in green. Some of the leaves of this plant 


[18] 


A Haunt of the Wild Smilax 



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Fence Rows and Thickets 


in our latitude persist on the vines nearly or quite until 
spring. The frost colors them exquisitely in many tones 
of orange and crimson, which in the sunshine make a 
bright spot in the chill landscape, reminding the rambler 
in frozen fields of Portia’s candle, which shone like a good 
deed in a naughty world. 


[19] 







































MARCH 




A Window in Arcady 


March 15. —Spring arrived and went into hiding in 
the river meadows a couple of week ago, and all the dis¬ 
agreeable weather that followed hard upon her coming 
was not able entirely to keep her presence a secret. The 
willows ever since have been full of it, every bare twig 
of them aglow and beaming with the radiance caught 
from her, and they stand out in the landscape with crowns 
enveloped in aureoles of dreamy, yellow light—spectacles 
of rare and delicate beauty. The robins, too, soon got an 
inkling of her being about, and from their perches on the 
fence or on the stays that support the telegraph poles, the 
red-vested fellows have for some days been knowingly 
eyeing every passer-by, as though they could tell him a 
thing or two if they chose. But the song sparrows—bless 
their melodious little throats!—cannot keep a secret at 
all, and they have been blurting out the whole story for 
a week, carolling from every water-side bush for all the 
world to hear: “Sweet-sweet-sweet, sweet o’ the year is 
near,” and so the news got out. 

The willows of the river meadows are not the stock that 
yield those precious posies of March, the pussy willows. 
These gray, silken-haired catkins that we all like to look 
at and stroke, and to buy in the market-place, are gotten 
usually from the goat willow of cultivated grounds, or 
from two or three species of wild willow shrubs found 
about swamps or along creeks, or sometimes at the edges of 
woods in the hills. The pussy, by the way, is rather 
skeptical of early March promises, and does not come out 
all at once, but after unbolting its door and emerging 
part way from its winter house on the twig, it likes to bide 

[22] 




















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Willows and Alders 


Awakening Catkins 


a while and look leisurely about w T ith an eye on Jack 
Frost. It is in this early stage of temporarily arrested 
development that pussy willows are in the most serviceable 
condition for home decoration. Cut then from the 
branches and kept out of water, the fat little catkins retain 
their sleekness and characteristic color for a long time, 
and may even be used effectively in the trimming of ladies’ 
hats. 

Another catkin that is feeling the spring in the air is 
that of the alder. This shrub, which many people persist 
in confusing in their minds with the very different elder, 
is even more of a water drinker than the willow, and 
grows everywhere in sociable clumps by the meadow runs. 
Its catkins, at least the male ones, got in line early, long 
before there was any hope of the doors of the spring per¬ 
formance being open—in fact, last fall—and all through 
the winter they were patiently enduring the cold in stif¬ 
fened purple clusters on the branches. Now, under the 
genial influence of the sun’s waxing power, they are 
stretching themselves luxuriously into tassels of magenta 
and gold, and, by-and-by, like confetti throwers at the 
carnival, they will be casting prodigal showers of yellow 
pollen upon the winds. Companions with them, set close 
upon the twigs, are the staid little crimson cones, now 
gleaming in the sunlight like bits of rubies, that are to 
develop the seeds of the year. The empty cones of a year 
ago, black, lifeless and gaping now, still persist upon the 
branches and add a picturesque touch to the shrub in 
flower. 

March 20.—The wind, tired at last with blustering, 

[23] 


A Window in Arcady 


has paused for breath, and I close my desk and go for an 
hour or two to the fields in quest of whitlow grass. In 
southeastern Pennsylvania this little plant is usually the 
first wilding of the year to bloom—barring the skunk cab¬ 
bage, which seems more of a joke than a serious blossom 
—and the finding of it is an assurance, as comforting as 
the first bluebird’s visit, that spring is really at hand. Its 
tiny white flowers are twinkling prettily in the gray mat 
of last year’s turf in old fields and on roadside banks, even 
in advance of the hepatica, or the bloodroot, or the anem¬ 
one. Common as it is, however, few people seem to regard 
the plant, or to know’ it. A small rosette of leaves which 
a dime may cover, flat to the ground, with a slender 
branched stalk two or three inches high rising from the 
centre and bearing a cluster of small flowers—that is 
whitlow grass. The seed pods are so impatient to be up 
and doing that they cannot always wait for the flowers to 
drop, but are often seen, in shape like flat spear-heads, 
protruding from the heart of the unfallen corollas. We 
may lift a few plants, root and all, and they will, if placed 
in a shallow saucer of water in a window at home, con¬ 
tinue to grow and bloom and set their seed-vessels as 
cheerfully as though they were outdoors—a sure source of 
pleasure and interest to the stay-at-homes. The flowers 
are so sensitive to shadow that they expand fully only 
when the sun shines on them, like some shy human na¬ 
tures which cannot do their best without the warmth and 
light of kindly treatment. 

The name of the whitlow grass is due to an old-time 
association of the plant with the cure of whitlow, a painful 


[24] 


Lesson of the Whitlow Grass 


disease of the finger joints. It is not really a grass, but a 
pigmy member of the hot-blooded family of the mustards. 
Some of its distant relatives are of a habit of growth so 
robust in comparison with the minute seeds from which 
they spring that the mustard seed, as we know, has been 
used in the Divine teaching to typify the development of 
the heavenly nature from the seed of the Kingdom im¬ 
planted in the human heart. It is not given our little 
mustard, the whitlow grass, to produce branches in which 
the fowls of the air can lodge, yet in its humble way it 
would seem to have a lesson to teach in Christian living. 
Look the open blossom full in the face, and you will see 
that its four petals are so set as to form a cross. So is 
the plants cheery daily life under the cross a type of the 
Christian disciple’s day, which also, in proportion to the 
reality of his discipleship, is a day of cross-bearing. And 
just as amid the flowers the seed vessels grow and ripen, 
so is the Christian’s cross not barren, but ever fruitful in 
good deeds. 

March 24. —These last days of March Mother Nature 
is bustling about the woods waking up her plant children, 
stripping the covers from their snug winter beds and expos¬ 
ing the sleepy little buds to the chill morning air in the 
most hard-hearted way imaginable. On the warm slopes 
hepaticas in blue and white have been up for a week mak¬ 
ing pollen, much to the gratification, doubtless, of sundry 
small bugs and bees and palpitating butterflies, which the 
sun lately lured abroad, and which may now be seen dis¬ 
tractedly flying this way and that in nervous endeavor to 
solve the never-ending problem of what to eat and where 
to get it. 


[25] 


A Window in Arcady 


The spring beauty, too, has been roused out of its 
warm nest, and is shaking its clustered buds in the sunny 
air like rebellious clenched fists. Every lover of the vernal 
woods knows this exquisite little flower, its white petals 
flushed with auroral pink, which is shot through with red 
rays. In gathering it it is noticeable that the stems of 
the plants always snap off at or just below the ground, 
so that one rarely ever sees the roots. The reason of this 
is that the plant springs from a deep tuber which anchors 
it fast. To find the roots requires careful and persistent 
grubbing. The redman used to be a more inveterate 
hunter of spring beauties than we palefaces are, but for a 
different reason. It was those tubers that he was after, 
and when he found them he ate them with great gusto. 
They have a crisp, pleasant taste suggesting chestnuts. 

Hard by, the snowy blossoms of the blood-root are ex¬ 
panding, their stems wrapped about with the drapery of 
their one big leaf, and in stony places the chubby rosettes 
of the saxifrage are showing white dots of coming bloom 
in their centres. One naturally looks for blossoms of the 
arbutus in this goodly fellowship of early comers, for the 
poets like to tell us of its blooming by a snowbank. As a 
matter of fact, however, this flower is quite suspicious of 
such companionship, at least in our latitude, and is usually 
very cautious about uncovering its perfumed chalices before 
a number of the other wildings have gone on ahead and 
reported the coast clear. 

Fringing the ledges and carpeting the summits of the 
rocks are the evergreen polypody ferns. During the 
winter’s cold snaps they were curled into pictures of de- 


[26] 


Oaks in the Cradle 


jection, but now they are enjoying the reward of the 
persevering and are basking in the light of good times 
again. With pretty green faces washed clean and glossy 
by the early rains and most of the kinks brushed out of 
their erstwhile disheveled fronds, they nod gayly at all 
visitors when the sun is not too hot. It is pleasant to see 
them, after a wetting, alert as though they had particular 
instructions to sit up and look pretty. Thoreau has a 
special word of commendation for this commonest of our 
ferns—“the cheerful community of the polypody” he calls 
its clustered fronds in one of his books. 

March 25.—It is as good as a tonic to see the acorns 
now. After a winter spent in luxurious ease they are 
learning what it is to earn their board and lodging. They 
have thrown off their caps, and, with red faces and jack¬ 
ets split up every seam, are intently engaged in putting 
down taproots into the mellow earth, digging away for 
dear life. As a result of this fit of industry the woods 
will by and by be full of tiny oak trees—most of them, 
sad to relate, destined to be eaten up by grubs and fungi 
and such small deer. An oak just out of the cradle is a 
jaunty little fellow, with a fat, juicy stalk and the two 
chunky halves of the acorn, probably still in the shell, 
clinging to it like a lunch in a bag, for it is on the stock of 
starch stored in the meat of the nut that the plantlet sub¬ 
sists until it develops strength enough to make a living for 
itself. 

March 28.—Among the earliest gifts of green to the 
woods is the despised field garlic—a plant which is by no 
means confined to the fields. A tuft of it plucked and 

[ 27 ] 


A Window in Arcady 


carried as we walk exhales a warm, aromatic perfume, 
very grateful to the system tired of winter provender and 
craving freshness, and to our surprise, though we detest 
the taste, we find ourselves again and again burying our 
noses in the plebeian posy. Field garlic, by the way, is not 
native to America, though the wild leek is, but is said to 
have been first introduced into Pennsylvania by the early 
Welsh settlers, who thought it would make a pleasant 
sort of spring pasture—certainly a characteristic idea of 
a people from the land where the leek was a national 
emblem. 

We had a severe sleet storm in February and of all the 
trees that suffered by it the river birches appear to have 
taken it hardest. They have literally been shedding tears 
as a result, so that people passing under their boughs during 
the last few weeks have been treated to shower baths of 
sap which has been issuing from the broken branches and 
falling pattering to the ground beneath. The river birch 

is, indeed, a fountain of refreshment in March when the 
sap is running, and refuses no thirsty wayfarer who taps 

it. Thrust your knife into the bark, insert a splinter at 
a declining angle, hold a cup to catch the drippings, and 
you have in a few minutes a mouthful of a beverage as clear 
and cool as spring water, with the faintest possible sug¬ 
gestion of sugar in it. 


[28] 




The Meadow Brook in March 


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APRIL 




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A Window in Arcady 


April io. —Now is the time of year when the fancy 
of many a country-born citizen of slender purse turns to 
thoughts of his inherited rights in Nature’s great kitchen 
garden, and he promises himself the first fine Sunday off 
to hunt “greens” in the fields. Of these unquestionably 
the most gathered—probably because the most abundant 
—are the tender new leaves of the dandelion, which have 
long done duty on old-fashioned country tables as a pleas¬ 
ant and wholesome salad. The sprouts of the plebeian 
poke, however, make a good second in popular favor, and 
a mess of these boiled as cabbage would be, with a bit of 
juicy ham, livened up with a dash of vinegar, makes for 
some palates just the acme of good eating—a continuing 
delicacy to be enjoyed, too, in reminiscence like a cud for 
memory to chew. 

The first shoots of the common chicory, the plant whose 
blue stars of bloom adorn every August wayside, have some 
devotees, and doubtless would have more, but for the fact 
that comparatively few Americans know the plant in its 
first appearances. It is only a tramp here, but in Europe 
it has for centuries been cultivated as a crop, and latterly 
in our West, some farmers have taken to cultivating it in 
a small way. 

In the swamps and along the meadow streams the red 
maples are in full bloom at last, their flaming masses 
of color making the pallid cheek of earth ruddy again 
with the hue of abounding life. Like the flush in the sky 
at dawn which heralds the sun, the red maple’s blossoming 
is herald of a greater glory shortly to be—the bursting 
into leaf of all the forest fellowship. When we see it 


[ 30 ] 


Elfin Laundry 


flowering we know that winter is surely gone over the 
hills and can no more come back than last night can. It 
is noticeable that some of these trees are of a much more 
vivid red than others; a condition which is due to the fact 
that such individuals are bearers of the pistillate flowers, 
which are a deep crimson in color, while those of the stam- 
inate trees have a tone of yellow in them. 

Among the firstlings of the floral year is that dainty 
wild flower to which common speech has attached the 
unpoetic but obvious name of Dutchman’s breeches. 
These early April days, as one threads the recesses of rich 
moist woodlands, one occasionally comes upon a colony of 
it, the prettily dissected foliage covering the ground per¬ 
haps for square yards like a gossamer carpet. From the 
midst of leafy coverts here and there the flower stalks 
arise strung with the odd breeches-like blossoms, one set 
above another, sometimes eight or ten on a stalk. 

To walk unexpectedly upon such a scene is like sur¬ 
prising Fairyland with its masculine wash hung up on 
poles to dry. One’s fancy likes to dwell upon the thought 
of stout Hollandish elves fitted into those cream-colored 
inexpressibles, each with a lovely yellow frill at the waist¬ 
band, the whole of such a tinting and texture as philosophy 
of human tailor never dreamt of. This charming wild 
flower is cousin to the showy bleeding heart of old gardens. 

April 15. —“The rose is red, the violet’s blue”—so 
runs the familiar song of childhood, but it does scant 
justice to the various hues of either rose or violet. The 
first, indeed, of native violets to bloom bears a lovely yel¬ 
low blossom—a quaint, saffron bonnet streaked with brown 

[ 31 ] 


A Window in Arcady 


within. It was beginning to look up from amid the brown 
leaves in our hills a week ago. The poet Bryant knew this 
flower well, and has sung its charms in familiar verse: 

“Ere beechen buds begin to swell, 

And woods the bluebird’s warble know, 

The yellow violet’s modest bell 
Peeps from the last year’s leaves below.” 

By the banks of woodland rills and in moist meadows 
the dainty white violets are beginning to waken up to 
captivate the heart of everybody that sees them. Com¬ 
panioning the common blue and purple sorts about May 
day will be two late blooming yellow violets, whose flowers 
are borne high on leafy stems. There is one species with 
blossoms that are pale lavender or cream-colored. 

April 18. —Man’s faithful benefactor, the earthworm, 
is about again. He has been spending the winter in seclu¬ 
sion below the frost line with a few friends, all fast asleep 
together. The earthworm is such an uncomplaining crea¬ 
ture, so unassertive and so absolutely lacking in elements 
of picturesqueness, that his value to the world is by no 
means generally appreciated. He is a type of a great army 
of humanity, nameless in history or even in the country 
paper, whose unremitting faithfulness in hidden avenues 
of humdrum duty, day in and day out, keeps society sound 
and its wheels unclogged. For he is, indeed, “Nature’s 
plowman,” perpetually keeping the earth loosened by his 
borings, making ground mellow and fertile that would 
otherwise settle down to hardness and sourness, bringing 
the subsoil to the top and vice versa—this last a process 


[ 32 ] 


Ways of the Earthworm 

which also tends to preserve the land level and to cover 
natural rubbish, such as vegetable litter and stones. In this 
way it is said the whole of the superficial earth of any 
fertile field passes every few years through the bodies of 
these dumb, insignificant delvers. 

The reason the earthworm is so fond of eating dirt is 
probably because he can extract from it certain microscopic 
organisms that inhabit it and which he finds nutritious. 
He rivals the goat in omniverousness, however, for he will 
swallow anything that fits his mouth, and those who pro¬ 
fess to know all about him credit him with a pretty taste 
in small stones and bits of glass. Judged from a human 
standpoint, he keeps very bad hours, being as a rule out 
all night. In fact, one rarely sees him abroad by day, un¬ 
less after a shower when he comes up for a bath or a drink 
for he is a thirsty soul and has no use for neighborhoods 
that are dry. If he had any say in ordering the universe 
he would probably abolish moles and robins. The former 
catch and eat him below the ground and the latter on top. 
Indeed, even within his'.own jtfoorwa^ fre is liable to be 
pounced upon by the robin, -&nd* ©fie of th£ ‘delectable sights 
of the year to small boys of all ages is to see the bird brac¬ 
ing himself in the grass with his stiff legs, while with his 
head drawn back he hauls the resisting, attenuated worm 
slowly but remorselessly out of his hole. 

April 20.—A name full of suggestive beauty given by 
the English to one of their spring blossoms, is wake-robin. 
We have imported the name into America and attached it 
to quite another sort of flower; so that while the wake- 
robin of the old world is a kind of Jack-in-the-pulpit, the 

[ 33 ] 


A Window in Arcady 


wake-robins of America are those pretty mountaineer 
cousins of the lilies known to the botanical as trilliums. 
In our neighborhood we have but one species, a denizen 
of loamy, moist woods, and nowadays somewhat of a 
rarity. The plant looks very much like the Jack-in-the- 
pulpit, but the pure white blossom is hidden from view 
beneath the large green leaves that top the stalk. 

Wake-robins are strange plants in their persistent de¬ 
votion to the mystic number three. Thus the number of 
leaves is three ,* three are the petals of the flowers, and three 
the divisions of the calyx; the pistil is three-parted and set 
about with stamens whose number is twice three. To 
cap the climax, the seed vessel is three-celled within and 
frequently three-angled without. In the mountains a 
species is common which bears conspicuous pods of a dull 
crimson color. These have appealed to the rustic imagina¬ 
tion in such a way as to gain for the plant among the 
country folk the very realistic names of “bloody noses” and 
“nose-bleed.” 

Thick as autumn,; leaves-in Vallambrosa’s storied brook, 
the mottled leaves of* the^ dog’s/tooth violet are clustered 
now in almost every damp wood and shady meadow, and 
lifted above them here and there the yellow lily-like blos¬ 
soms nod and nod. That this flower should be called a 
violet is misleading, for it is a true lily, and looks every 
inch its lily-hood—one of the most splendid of our wild 
flowers. The plants that bloom are, as a rule, at least three 
years old, and their history is rather interesting. The first 
year’s seedling consists simply of one leaf springing from a 
bulb lying close to the surface of the ground. This little 

[34] 


Crosiers of the Ferns 









<V 4 1 

c 

o 

o c» 

c < » fc 


c o ( 


( l 
f 



< < 
c 
c 
c 

C < 


» 


How Dog’s Tooth Violets Grow 


bulb in the course of the season sends down a shoot and 
develops another bulb at the further end an inch or two 
under ground. The next year this bulb number two usually 
sends up only a single leaf, and at the same time lets down 
another shoot into the earth, there to develop a third bulb 
which is perhaps three or four inches below the surface of 
the ground. From this deepest bulb, the others meantime 
having died, two leaves will arise the third year, and the 
charming flower we all love appears with them. Like the 
efflorescence of a beautiful human soul, the blossom is no 
hasty, superficial growth, but is the crown of a life whose 
springs lie deep. 

The slippery elm is already setting its seeds—those flat, 
filmy disks that come floating down upon us put of the tree- 
tops like flakes of ethereal wampum, to our puzzlement 
until we have learned what they are. The slippery elm, 
which is not uncommon along Pennsylvania fence rows and 
on the fertile banks of sylvan streams, is a somewhat 
homely tree, being short and ungainly in comparison with 
the stately grace of its classic cousin the American elm— 
the elm of history—but it is firmly endeared to all hearts 
by reason of its fragrant, mucilaginous inner bark, which 
everybody knows. On a damp day in spring the atmos¬ 
phere of woods where these trees are abundant is per¬ 
ceptibly perfumed with the characteristic odor of this bark. 
To smell it there is a pleasant experience, the memory of 
which abides with us long after we have returned indoors 
serving to make indoors tolerable. 

April 25. —Everybody has a warm spot in his heart for 
the ferns; even nature is disposed to indulge them a little 

[35] 


A Window in Arcady 


and to let them sleep late in the morning of the year, so 
that it is only within the last week, when some of the wild 
plants have been thinking of going to seed, that the ferns 
have been stirring. One sees them now stretching up their 
pretty arms and fists from beneath their leafy coverlets 
in wood and swamp and holding them there as though 
half inclined to lie in bed a while longer if they might. 
Among the first of this graceful tribe to unroll their fronds 
are those large, wooly-stalked ferns of the swamps and 
wet meadows called osmundas. People learned in wood¬ 
craft obtain a toothsome morsel from these ferns, the leaf¬ 
stalks of which at the point where they are attached to the 
root-stock being in spring white and tender as celery and 
with a pleasant, chestnutty taste. “The heart of Os¬ 
mund” the old English herbalists called this dainty bit in 
the British species. 

Fields are gay now with the dandelions’ round suns 
of bloom, to the great delight of the babies. Of all our 
wild flowers none is commoner, yet none perhaps has 
power like these to touch simple souls. They are poor 
folks’ crocuses blooming freely and without price and 
filling all the grass with such a golden light that the sub¬ 
limated sunshine of a whole winter seems concentrated in 
each round disk. It is useless, however, to gather the 
blooms, unless for the material purpose of dandelion wine, 
for they close in the hand and never open again; so stoop 
to them if you would enjoy their beauty, look into their 
orange-yellow centres rimmed round with a ring of paler 
gold, and if you do not rise with a tenderer heart be sure 
the world has a hard grip on you. There is something 


[36] 


Quaker Ladies of the Fields 

almost startling in the sudden appearance of hundreds of 
these bright flowers on some roadside bank, where none 
were visible the night before; they awaken ones latent 
faith in magic and the reality of fairy life. 

Another field flower which the warming earth has en¬ 
couraged into abundant bloom during the last few days 
is that small, lavender-colored blossom with a yellow eye 
known to all good Philadelphians as the Quaker Lady. 
Myriads of these flowers are now expanded in pasture 
lands and on wayside slopes, often forming dense patches 
of pale color that are conspicuous from long distances. In 
New England a quaint common name for them is inno¬ 
cence, and elsewhere in our country they are called bluets— 
a term which is probably of foreign importation, though the 
flower itself is a native American. The name Quaker 
Lady seems to be confined to the neighborhood of Philadel¬ 
phia, for it is not even mentioned in Dr. Darlington’s 
classic work on the flowers of Chester County. There is a 
particular charm in the buds, which are shaped like tiny 
rectangular boxes pinched in at the top and droop bash¬ 
fully on slender stalks. 

There is preaching by Jack-in-the-pulpit this week in 
every woodland. A week ago, when he was just coming 
out of winter quarters, you would scarcely have known 
him. The first appearance of this familiar plant is in the 
shape of a spear point, which when four or five inches 
high opens down the side and lets Jack out. A most dis¬ 
couraged-looking object he is then, very flat and with 
leaves attenuated and all adroop, suggesting a man who has 
just been released from a folding bed that had shut upon 

[37J 


A Window in Arcady 


him. A few days of fine weather, however, make a new 
man of him and he is now among the jauntiest of all the 
woodfolk. Every country child knows the intense, biting 
acridity of the bulb-like root of this plant, which also goes 
under the name of the Indian turnip because the redmen 
used it for food. One must respect the memory of that 
aboriginal genius of the kitchen, whoever she was, who 
discovered that roasting the fiery vegetable transformed it 
into a harmless ball of starchy nutrition. 

Near neighbor to the Indian turnip in rich woods grow* 
the wild ginger. This is one of the oddest of our sylvan 
blossoms and is sure to interest those who see it for the first 
time. In April the creeping, snake-like root puts up buds, 
each of which develops a pair of stout, heart-shaped leaves 
and between them a short-stalked, furry little flower 
grayish without and dark purple within, and resembling 
a cup with three wavy, tapering handles. At first the two 
leaves interlock in such a way as to form a protecting 
chalice about the flower, but when the latter’s infancy 
is passed the leaves grow upward beyond the reach of the 
short-legged blossom, which then lays its cheek confidingly 
against old Mother Earth’s and so lives out its little life 
to the profit of sundry humble bugs that creep about the 
ground, glad of a chance at pollen and honey-stores scj 
convenient to their reach. A pleasant characteristic of the 
wild ginger, which, by the way, is no relation at all of true 
ginger, is the aromatic fragrance which it exhales from 
root and leaf—a pungent perfume which has given rise to 
the popular name of the plant, and has caused the root tc 
be extensively employed in the manufacture of perfumery. 


[38] 


Flowering of the Pines 


April 26.—The early mosquito is up and looking about 
him, adding his minstrelsy to the songs of the sparrows 
and the peeping of the marsh frogs. In spite of popular 
belief to the contrary, he is a strict vegetarian and though 
it sounds ungallant to say so, it is the ladies of his party— 
his wife and female relatives—that bite people and sip 
their blood. As a matter of fact, the male mosquito is a 
most peaceable fellow—if the men who write natural 
history are to be believed—and lives exclusively on an 
Arcadian fare of plant juices. 

April 28.—One of the pleasures of April is to go tc 
the woods and see the pine trees in blossom. There is 
nothing showy about a pine blossom; in fact, it is so 
small and so destitute of all that goes to make up a flower 
in the popular estimation, that a careless observer might 
look at a tree in full bloom and not realize its condition. 
Yet, to lover eyes the pine then is enhaloed with a tender 
glory that once seen is not soon forgotten. The flowers 
are of the simplest pattern, without corolla, and of two 
sexes—the males, whose number is legion, being set in 
clustered, light yellow or purplish catkins among the 
leaves near the branch tips, and the females, which are 
much less numerous, not far distant from them. These 
latter may be recognized by their resemblance to little 
brushes with stubby cream-colored bristles. They develop 
in two years into the mature cones with which everybody 
is familiar. The male blossoms discharge an incredible 
quantity of yellow pollen, which sometimes is caught up 
by the wind and carried great distances, to descend in 
sulphur showers and make a news-note in the papers. 


[39] 


A Window in Arcady 


Among all the trees of our northern woods, there is no 
family so ancient as that of the pines. Fellow-dwellers 
with the great lycopods and sigillarias and catamites, now 
long extinct, but which crowded the miasmal swamps of 
the Carboniferous Era before coal was laid or man created, 
the pines serve to link us with earth’s infancy—with old 
chaos and the reign of night—with things primal and 
fundamental. Down all these ages they have come, pre¬ 
serving in their character the traits of that far-off period 
when life’s method was more direct than now; of which 
it may be part of their mission to remind us. The up¬ 
right shaft of the trunk pointing without halt or division 
of purpose heavenward; the straightforward swing of the 
branches outward on every side free from crookedness; the 
simple tufted leaves, which return alike to winter’s blasts 
and summer zephyrs the soft answer of fragrance and of 
music—these inheritances of the pine savor of a time be¬ 
fore sin and guile had entered into the world, and we may 
well heed their lesson. 

With the passing of the months most trees change their 
foliage, a new mood for each season, but the pines are al¬ 
ways the same. Amid the stress and glare of the high¬ 
road and the market-place, we sometimes remember fondly 
the balsamic odors, the restful twilight and the silence 
of the pine forest aisles as we knew them long ago, and 
we are sure should we return to them, at whatever season, 
we should find all as we had left it. So, in an unstable 
world, the pine stands for the steadfast nature—the de¬ 
pendable one that never disappoints. 


[40] 







MAY 

i 





A Window in Arcady 


May i. —All the excitement of the world this last 
week has by no means been confined to the stock markets. 
Quiet folk, who, having freedom of mind and inclination 
to watch other things than brokers’ blackboards, have had 
their reward in witnessing the trees burst into leaf—an 
event which has been later this season than usual, but 
which, once begun, has been accomplished with startling 
suddenness. 

A few days ago there was scarcely an opened leaf bud on 
a tree in all our countryside. For some reason unknown 
to mortals, April and Old Sol were at loggerheads this 
year. April pouted and cried her best days away, and 
Sol, Achilles-like, sulked in a tent of clouds, and so be¬ 
tween them they managed to hold back the whole leafy 
procession until May was at the very door. 

Then, presto! and the race of the trees for the first full 
suit of the year is on. The thick, gummy scales in which 
the buds snugly spent the winter in security from icy 
blasts crack at last in every tree top and come dropping 
to the earth in chaffy showers. Out of the buds comes a 
variety of things. Here are, first of all, the infant leaves 
which unfold themselves very neatly and grow into big 
leaves with almost the rapidity of Jack’s beanstalk; then 
there comes the new twig growth, which, instead of being 
spread over a whole season as one is apt to think, is usually 
completed in these first few days of real spring; and then 
again, there come the flowers of the tree, for every tree 
bears flowers, though sometimes so modestly that the care¬ 
less world never sees them. We all know the blossoms of 
the fruit trees, and the showy panicles of the horse chest- 


142] 


A May Meadow 





































Color in Spring Woods 


nut, but many a good citizen goes to his grave in ignorance 
of what an oak flower looks like or a hickory or walunt 
blossom. 

Now that the buds have burst, what a glory is in all 
the tree tops! We speak of the tender green of spring, 
but that does scant justice to the actual fact. The color 
of the spring woods is nearly as varied if not so brilliant as 
the tints of autumn. The unfolding maples are bronze 
and red; the oaks sometimes a quiet crimson, sometimes a 
creamy yellow, sometimes a brilliant red, as though dipped 
in blood; the birches and poplars and tulip trees an ethe¬ 
real shade of yellow; the hickories a tawny brown. It 
is as though the woods’ first thought on awakening to a 
new year was of the glory of the autumnal evening when 
they fell asleep, and for a moment the memory of that old 
glory suffuses all their being. It is, however, only for a 
moment; almost as we look the delicate tones fade away 
like the colors of the dawn in the sky, and the work-a-day 
garment of green is over them all. 

May 3. —The meadows where the marsh marigold 
grows are quite likely to be vocal nowadays with melan¬ 
choly double whistles long drawn out. You look in vain, 
perhaps, for the source of these plaintive calls, which 
sound first on one side of you and then on another, now at 
your feet and now in the air, until if you are of a nervous 
disposition you are half inclined to believe the place 
haunted. You are, indeed, in a field with meadow larks, 
which are of a color so like the ground whereon they feed 
and nest that they are quite invisible except to the trained 
eye. As you walk, however, the birds rise and fly, display- 

[43] 


A Window in Arcady 


ing the characteristic yellow breast of their kind and two 
conspicuous shafts of white, one at each side of the tail. 
The flight of the meadow lark is often in circles, and if 
you happen to be in the centre about which he whirls it 
makes your brain reel to follow him. He is, by the way, 
in spite of his name, no relation to the Shakespearean song¬ 
ster at heaven’s gate; indeed is less lark than starling. 

Now that the red maples are through blooming, the 
sugar maples have begun. These attract less attention 
than their florid cousins, but to people who have open 
eyes for the less showy side of nature few sights are more 
charming than a sugar tree in flower. From the midst of 
the opening leaf buds at the branch tips the greenish-yellow 
blossoms swing in long-stalked clusters, enveloping the 
crown in a tender mist of inexpressible loveliness. Al¬ 
though the sugar tree is a native of the United States from 
New England to the Gulf, the specimens to be seen along 
our roadsides are mostly of man’s setting out, not Nature’s, 
for it is one of the most satisfactory trees to transplant, 
growing readily in almost any environment. A curious 
characteristic is its bark, which is frequently of two dis¬ 
tinct sorts on the same tree—the upper bole and branches 
being covered with the smooth, silvery skin that we usually 
associate with maples, while the lower trunk is encased 
in a cracked, flaky integument resembling that of the shell- 
bark hickory. In Pennsylvania this maple is especially 
abundant in the highlands of Somerset County, which 
contains the most elevated land in this State. There it 
is the commonest of trees; almost every farm has its sugar 
grove, and the region ranks with the most important maple 


[44] 


Gardens in the Tree Tops 

sugar districts in our country. Somerset farmers will 
tell you that a sugar tree is worth as much as a cow. 

While we are looking into the treetops the buttonwoods 
are worth attention now. Like thrifty farmers, who do 
not part with the whole of a crop until another is in sight, 
these trees have been holding fast to some of their brown 
seed-balls, apparently until certain that this year’s weather 
conditions would be right for ripening a fresh lot. They 
are dropping the last of their seeds now, and if we look 
sharply among the new leaves we shall see, dangling from 
their midst, hundreds of queer little fat balls on long 
stems. These are the great tree’s modest flowers, which 
are the least sensational of blossoms, each hardly as big 
as a shoe peg, and scores of them packed into those spheri¬ 
cal heads of Doric simplicity of form. Some of the balls 
are dark red, and they are male blossoms, which, their 
pollen spent, disappear from view as a man who has run 
through his money drops out of sight of his quondam com¬ 
panions. Others of the balls are green, with a rosy 
tinge to their greenness; these are the female flowers, 
destined to become seed-bearers, and so, if all go well, to 
persist till next year. In some parts of our country this 
tree is called the sycamore, but it is a misnomer—the 
real sycamore, that of the Syrian lowlands and of the 
Bible, being a very much smaller and different tree, related 
to the fig and the mulberry. 

May 12.—As the tulips on the lawns drop their petals 
and settle down to the homely condition of seed bearing 
nature prepares a second tulip show among the treetops. 
The blossoms of the tulip poplar—one of the cleanest, 

[45] 


A Window in Arcady 


straightest and most thoroughbred of our native trees— 
are beginning to open. This tree when in close company 
with others does not branch out until so high in the air 
that we cannot see the flowers with any satisfaction, but 
when a specimen is encountered dwelling singly in the 
open the crown is lower and more spreading and it is 
worth our while to look along the branches for the great 
cups of yellowish bloom exquisitely dashed with orange 
and silvery green. The tulip tree is a relative of the 
flowering magnolia, so that it would seem to come na¬ 
turally by its love of fine flowers. 

Americans in search of spring greens would hardly think 
of turning to a nettle patch for material, yet in the Old 
World, particularly among the peasantry of Ireland and 
Scotland, the shoots of this roadside pest cut before flower¬ 
ing are esteemed as a pot-herb of some value. Indeed, in 
earlier times, when the vegetable garden was less well 
stocked than now, even the quality found cooked nettles 
palatable, for garrulous Mr. Pepys, the famous diarist, 
has minutely set down the fact of his eating nettle por¬ 
ridge on February 27, 1661, and finding it very good. 
The sting of the plant is produced by an intensely burning 
juice emitted from the tips of the hairs with which stems 
and leaves are covered. The acrid character of this juice 
is entirely subdued by drying and boiling, and so nettle 
broth and nettle porridge have found a place on rustic 
bills of fare. 

May 15. —These pleasant May mornings, when the 
wind blows languor from the south and industrious 
farmers are plowing fields and digging garden, expectant 
[46] 


Brothers of the Angle 


flocks of chickens trailing in their wake, every man and 
boy with a drop of vagabond blood in his veins is tempted 
to go fishing. Accordingly if we follow the path through 
the sweet-flag meadows down to the creek where the oaks 
are shaking out their delicate catkins above the water we 
shall be pretty sure now to find the most comfortable 
spots along shore pre-empted by brothers of the angle. 
Silent and motionless they sit, an ever-present sense of the 
possibility of a bite giving a spice of excitement to a life 
which meantime has touches of Eden in it—the benediction 
of the sunshine and the breeze, the melody of birds and the 
fragrance of sweet flowers. Mysterious, indeed, are the 
ways of nature that in every generation she should plant 
in certain elect breasts this same longing to sit in the 
shade of a bush and contentedly watch a cork on the water 
till it be pulled under. 

May i 8. —The wild azalea is everywhere filling the 
woods and glades of Whitsuntide with the glory of its 
bloom. This trim little shrub can always be depended 
upon to come into blossom at this season of the church’s 
Pentecostal festival, which was known among the early 
Dutch settlers as Pinkster—a word near akin to our pres¬ 
ent-day Pennsylvania German Pingsta; and as the flower- 
loving burghers of New Amsterdam could not fail to no¬ 
tice the profuse bloom of the beautiful wilding they 
gave it the name of Pinkster flower, by which it is known 
in the vicinity of New York to this day. Pennsylvanians 
usually call it the wild honeysuckle, though really it is 
not that, but a true azalea. The lovely flowers when at 
their best are arranged in soft, buoyant spheres at the 

[47] 


A Window in Arcady 


branch ends—often of a red so deep as to make one almost 
think the flame of a new Pentecost has come upon the 
bushes. 

The woods would seem to be taking other notice of 
Whitsuntide, too. There is, for instance, another preacher 
there now besides our familiar friend Jack-in-the-pulpit. 
The newcomer is a strange little orchid which loves to in¬ 
habit the loamy banks and hollows along woodland 
streams. Its flower at a short distance appears for all the 
world like the head of a cowled monk with a long, flow¬ 
ing white beard; or, looked at more closely, the upper 
part of the blossom is seen to be formed like a miniature 
purple hood or sounding board, and the pistil beneath it 
is not unlike the face of one speaking within. So the plant 
has come to be popularly known as the preacher-in-the- 
pulpit. No sight of the spring woods is more charming 
than one’s first glimpse of this little gnome-like flower 
looking shyly up from the mossy ground, with a face so 
nearly human that it seems as though it should have a hu¬ 
man message to deliver. 

Perhaps it would remind us by the shadowing forth of 
humanity in its outlines that the qualities of the rightly 
developed human life have prototypes in the flowers. In 
one, as in the other, there are sweetness and purity and 
simplicity; open-heartedness and a cheery brightness in fair 
weather and foul, shed with equal favor upon all creatures; 
and there is in each an equal dependence upon the divine 
largess for the wherewithal of the daily life. How 
great is the mystery of a flower! Before it the whole 
wisdom of this world stands baffled, impotent to ex- 


[48] 





























* o 

a a 

> a a . 



’ > a 

4 

♦ «* 


a 

a 


) 

a j 


a o 
a 

4 * * 










t 















Wl w 



The River’s Lower Reaches 




The River Meadows 


plain any absolute thing of its origin, its essence, or its ulti¬ 
mate mission in the earth. Yet it has power sometimes to 
make a hard heart tender and a tender heart glad, and the 
mind of faith ever finds in it an evidence of the universal 
providence of God, beyond which man cannot stray. 

In the pastures also, where the daisies are just begin¬ 
ning to open their eyes to the May, there is a touch of 
the same churchly feeling. Here in the shadow cast by 
the woods grows a stemless bulbous plant with clustered 
grass-like leaves and star-shaped flowers, which are white 
within and green outside, with white margins. This is 
the Star-of-Bethlehem, which is native to Palestine, the 
Levant and parts of Europe, and like the Heavenly Star 
for which it has been named, has spread its rays far and 
wide in the earth. It is a very particular little flower about 
its weather, and if the sun does not shine just to its liking 
it becomes sulky and stays shut; even under the most favor¬ 
able conditions it seems to open late in the day and close 
early. The irregularity of its flowers to open has given 
rise to a number of quaint names for it in the old world. 
Thus in England it is sometimes called sleepy Dick, and 
sometimes Betty-go-to-bed-at-noon; while to the French 
it is the lady-of-eleven-o’clock. 

May 25. —Along the lower reaches of our river Nature 
delights to weave some of her most subtle charms. Gray 
days such as have recently been giving us the blues in town 
are very pleasant days on those breezy flats. Cloudiness 
fits the mood of the wide meadows, the vast expanse of 
sky and the placid river, in whose waters the cloud changes 
are constantly reflected. 


[ 49 ] 


A Window in Arcady 


Once in a while the placidity of the river is disturbed 
by the passing of a steamer. The long ripples which her 
screw stirs up come rolling in at our feet, setting a-rustle 
the great beds of aromatic calamus, which grows in pro¬ 
digal abundance along these flats. Sweet flag is the old- 
fashioned country name for it. It is a sure sign of spring 
in town when we see upon the street the first bunch of 
the familiar, long, dirty-white roots swinging from the 
shoulders of some itinerant vendor. Time was when the 
plant was esteemed fit for princes’ gardens and Europeans 
used to import it from India for the domains of the rich. 
A popular Old World confection used also to be made 
from the warm, spicy root, which would be sliced for the 
purpose and the slices treated with sugar, with a result, 
one would imagine, like candied ginger. In some parts 
of New England the root is similarly prepared even yet. 

Not the least of the pleasures that the riverside has to 
offer is to be found about the old pilings and the wrecks 
of barges ingloriously stuck in the mud and left to the 
mercies of the elements. They represent commercial ven¬ 
tures in which man has no longer an interest, but Nature’s 
watchful eye has not overlooked them, and she has estab¬ 
lished gardens on them. To be sure, they are very humble 
plants she puts there, yet not incapable of touching the 
spring of feeling in human hearts, and so not without 
service. The crumbling cracks and ever-widening seams 
in planks and posts are rich in deposits of mould and river 
mud left by freshets, and furnish all the comforts of home 
to many a pleasant little plant—to the blue-flowered skull¬ 
cap, to the white smartweed, to grasses of several varieties, 

[50] 


Studies in Yellow 


and to the water-horehound, whose long runners dangle 
picturesquely in the air, if its lodging happens to be, as it 
often is, on the perpendicular side of a post. So, after 
their long day of homely labor, Nature gives the old 
hulks a crown of posies that she renews year after year, 
and will renew until the last wreck of them is gone. 

May 28. —Now and then Nature dearly loves to paint 
the world bright yellow. Just now, besides the ubiquitous 
buttercups and dandelions, there is an especially fine crop of 
yellow rocket or wild mustard blossoming in the meadows 
in patches so thick and broad that the grass where the 
flower grows is quite hidden. In the Old World this 
common wayside weed is sometimes called St. Barbara’s 
herb, presumably because the day of that saint occurs in 
December, when the plant is frequently gathered for 
winter salad. The root leaves are usually found alive 
throughout cold weather, and, like all the mustard tribe, 
are hot to the taste. To an American palate they make 
but a poor apology for a salad, however. Much pleasanter 
is our native wild peppergrass, whose little, flat, round 
seed-vessels are already maturing on plants not yet en¬ 
tirely out of flower. To pick a bunch and munch the 
green pods as you walk is to have your whole being 
brightened. They bite the tongue and exhilarate the brain, 
bracing up your physical system just as your sluggish soul 
is sometimes benefited by a good “talking to” from some 
plain-spoken, clear-sighted friend. 


[51] 


JUNE 










A Window in Arcady 


June i. —Whisky Run may be in almost any county, 
for, after our ancestors had given the jovial name to one 
sequestered brook among our wooded hills, the habit seems 
to have grown on them, and they gave it to still another, 
and so on, until, like Jones and Robinson among human 
patronymics, the appellative lost distinctiveness. On the 
other side of the ridge, like as not, flows Brandy Run, 
making its stony bed in a similar little glen. Such names 
are quite meaningless to-day, but they serve as picturesque 
memorials of a time when small distilleries, long since 
forgotten, nestled in many a shady pocket of the slopes now 
given over to soberer sort of work. 

These days of early summer are odorous in our 
Whisky Run with the spicy breath of the wild cherry 
in bloom, and upon the mossy bank violets and Solomon’s 
seal and bellwort, Indian cucumber, sweet cicely and “sas- 
parell” are sociably flowering. Its upper waters flow 
through sunny meadows, where spearmint grows, to 
breathe whose aromatic fragrance is like inhaling a poem, 
As children most of us have chewed the leaves of this 
beloved plant for the sake of their sweet, biting warmth, 
speedily changed into tingling coolness by a draught of 
water. The gathering of it forms one of the countryside’s 
minor industries in spring and early summer, when you 
see men clipping it in the meadows and tying their spoil 
into bunches to be sold to the mutton butchers in town for 
eventual use in the making of mint sauce. 

In the vicinity of old gardens peppermint also may be 
found growing wild in the grass, but it is not so abundant 
as the spearmint, from which it is distinguished by longer 


[54J 


A Roadside of one 


























/ 







t t 

• 

f 

c r 
c ® i. «• 


o 

c 


c « ' 
o 


t- t 


c 

I « 



« o 

c « 

C e 

C. «- *r 





























The Wood Thrush's Liquid Notes 


stalked leaves and blunt, short heads of bloom. In sum¬ 
mer the spearmint sends up its gracefully tapering spires 
of pale purple blossoms which are bunched in numerous 
separated clusters along the axis of the spike—a pretty 
sight that many overlook. It is said that mice have a parti¬ 
cular dislike for the smell of mint, and that a handful 
of the leaves thrown in a mouse-infested closet will drive 
the little pests away. 

June 2. —I find it*profitable at times to vary my coun¬ 
try rambles by sitting on a log by the pathside and sim¬ 
ply being still. My coming causes some consternation 
among the various small deer whose lives are laid in these 
pleasant wild places, and for a few minutes they will be 
shy of me, but by and by, when stillness has merged me 
into their permanent landscape, the play is on again. 
Robin runs and struts about the ground, showing off his 
spring vest and tilting his yellow beak in the sunlight; a 
wood wren flies in from the outer air carrying an unlucky 
worm, and, perching upon the fence, has luncheon, wip¬ 
ing her bill upon the rail when it is over. There a chip¬ 
munk sits and scolds, and here, leisurely loping, comes 
Br’er Rabbit, stopping now and then to enjoy the view 
till his bright eye lights on me, then if I move but a 
finger he is off through the brush, his white ball of a tail 
shining for a moment like a cotton meteor and is lost to 
sight. 

The wood thrush’s liquid notes dropping meditatively 
from above, the drowsy hum of foraging bees, the wood¬ 
pecker’s steady rat-tat-tat as he makes a xylophone of a 
distant tree, are like lullabies, and I am about dozing off, 

[55] 


A Window in Arcady 


when a rustle among the dry leaves awakens me to the 
neighborly presence of that humble fellow-traveler on 
life’s pathway, Bufo, the hoptoad. There he sits, stolid as 
the truth, homely as sin, and his eye, like Bunsby’s, fixed 
on the coast of Greenland. He is one of the most com¬ 
panionable of good fellows. Unlike the fearsome rabbit, 
he does not care if I do move a muscle or two; he will 
not disturb the current of my thoughts by irrelevant chatter 
like the scolding squirrel; never, like the busy bee, does 
he suggest industrious habits to me when I would have a 
respite from work and indulge my soul. In short, in the 
gentle art of “far niente” he is a past master. But all 
this, be it remembered, by daylight. When evening draws 
on and the twilight is filling the corners of the earth, he 
wakes up and takes a lively interest in the universe. Then 
he hops abroad in quest of bugs and slugs, which he 
dearly loves, launching the while upon the patient ear 
of night that gurgling song of content which we all know 
and which our alphabet can only represent as ur-r-r. 

Popular superstition has dealt unkindly with our warty 
friend. His undeniable homeliness, his horny forehead and 
his love of darkness all doubtless contributed to make him 
regarded in the Middle Ages as the devil’s representative 
on earth, and his skin was supposed to be poisonous to 
the touch. You will remember that a toad which sweltered 
venom was the first to go into the witches’ hellbroth in 
“Macbeth.” Even to this day the toad, like the snake, is 
generally regarded with aversion, and children will tell 
you that to handle one will give you warts. Nevertheless 
the little beast is quite harmless and is really a benefactor, 


[56] 


The Hoptoad’s Ways 


particularly in gardens, where he feeds on some forms of 
animal life injurious to vegetation. The common species 
of America is somewhat less warty than his European 
cousin, and, as becomes a true American, hops faster. 

June 5 .—May was a fretful month this year in our 
latitude, breaking easily into tears, and winter, lingering, 
chilled her lap; but because of the wet and cold, she has 
left to June such a heritage of lush green as otherwise 
would not have been. The intense richness of this green 
which is now upon wood and field and roadside is full of 
variety; it ranges in tone from a suggestion of yellow, as in 
the foliage of the buttonwoods, to a shade that is all but 
blue in some of the conifers. The eye that is weary with 
traveling the barren sands of cash books and ledgers turns 
to this living page and finds perfect restfulness. 

Most people who think themselves fond of nature yet 
make the mistake of keeping too much indoors when it 
rains. If you have mackintosh and rubbers you are 
weather-proof, and it is not meet that the ducks should 
put a man to shame. On a moist day this time of year 
the country is one great bouquet of subtle odors, through 
which your individual speck of humanity threads its way 
like a bug in a posy. To say nothing of flowers, there 
is the earthy fragrance of the fresh furrows in the fields; 
by the roadside, the aroma of mint and sweetbrier; in 
the woods, the breath of sweet cicely and spicewood and 
wild ginger. Crush a sassafras leaf or run your hand 
along a hickory branch and you liberate such odors as 
transport you in a twinkling to the shores of Araby the 
Blest or the Spice Islands. 


[57] 


A Window in Arcady 


June io. —If any man goes dirty in these United States 
it is not Nature’s fault. She not only sets water freely 
by the dusty wayside, but soap also. The particular form 
in which this natural soap masquerades is the familiar 
flower known as bouncing bet, common on waste lots, in 
fields and along country roads. Everybody knows the 
comfortable-looking plant, with its stout, sleek leaves 
and abundant stars of white or pinkish bloom. The leaves 
and root are rich in the vegetable principle which chem¬ 
ists term saponin, and the foliage, if bruised and agitated 
in water, will produce a lather like that which is made 
by manufactured soaps and possessing similar cleansing 
properties. In spite of its abundance in this country, the 
plant is not native born, but is an importation from over 
the sea. It used to be a favorite in old-fashioned gardens, 
and it was to adorn these, doubtless, that its seeds were 
first brought to America. Taking kindly to our land, it 
eventually escaped from the respectable seclusion of gar¬ 
den life and is now a confirmed gypsy. 

A flower-bedecked meadow or roadside has been com¬ 
pared to a living palimpsest, where in the popular names 
of many plants we may read some dim record of our 
race’s history—its joys and sorrows, its superstitions and 
bygone practices. Thus our buxom bouncing bet in the 
Old World is sometimes called fuller’s herb, a name 
which perpetuates the memory of medieval monasteries, 
where the brothers used it for removing stains from cloth. 
The yellow flowered St. John’s wort, which grows in al¬ 
most every field, recalls to the lover of quaint and curious 
lore the time when yearly on midsummer eve (June 24) 


[58] 


The Meadow’s Palimpsest 


every hill-top in Europe was ablaze with bonfires in honor 
of John the Baptist, and when the herb was gathered 
and woven into garlands—very efficacious, it was thought, 
in warding off the machinations of the devil and witches. 
Each tinv blue flower of the speedwell that is blooming in 
our meadows to-day was in the eyes of our sixteenth and 
seventeenth-century ancestors the miniature versimilitude 
of St. Veronica’s handkerchief, whereon, the legend ran, 
Christ on His way to Calvary wiped His face in agony 
and left the impress of His features. 

But you do not need to be a student of plant history 
to enter into the joy of a June roadside. This is the 
month when the wild roses swing their censers of incense 
in almost every fence row and meadow; when clover 
is abloom, and banks are red with the ripened fruit of 
wild strawberries, as fragrant as they are luscious to the 
taste. No less characteristic of June are the bunched 
blossoms of the wild grape, whose delicious perfume is 
one of the rare delights of the year. There are three 
native species of this cherished vine common in our neigh¬ 
borhood, probably the most familiar being the little chicken 
grape, whose black berries, ripe in November and about 
the size of peas, are principally composed of stones and 
acidity. They would mix quite harmoniously with the 
snaps and snails and puppy dogs’ tails, which, according 
to the nursery rhyme, are the component parts in the 
make-up of small boys. The so-called summer grape 
bears berries about twice as large as the chicken grape, 
is mature in September or October and is of a pleasanter 
flavor. More valuable than either of those, however, is 


[59] 


A Window in Arcady 


the fox grape, the musky fragrance of whose ripening 
clusters fills the dells of late August and when first per¬ 
ceived startles you with thoughts of autumn’s nearness. 
This is the wild stock of the Concord, Catawba and 
Isabella varieties of our markets. Did you ever notice 
that the flower of the grape does not expand? At ma¬ 
turity the corolla loosens at the base, and, stubbornly 
refusing to open its mouth, is pushed bodily off by the 
force of the growing stamens. 

June 20. —One of the most charming of our wild vines 
is the coral or trumpet honeysuckle, which grows in rich 
woodlands and on shady roadside banks. Its trumpet¬ 
shaped flowers, scarlet without and yellow within, may 
be found in bloom now and make one think of Tennyson’s 
“horns of Elfland faintly blowing.” An interesting fea¬ 
ture of this plant is that the upper pair of leaves is com¬ 
pletely welded together at the base, so as to form a sort 
of platform around the stem, above which the clustered 
flowers appear. This peculiar leaf structure is common 
to several species of honeysuckle, but is not a character¬ 
istic of the Japanese woodbine so frequent in American 
gardens. The latter species, by the way, is now so thor¬ 
oughly established as a wild vine that it may be classed 
as a naturalized American. So pertinacious is it in stak¬ 
ing out its claims on Uncle Sam’s great homestead and so 
densely does it grow in some places that it has even been 
known to overcome and smother the life out of poison 
ivy—a record which entitles the doughty plant to hon¬ 
orable mention. 

The honeysuckle and the climbing rose appear to divide 

[ 60 ] 


Wild Vines 


the honors pretty evenly as popular favorites for the cov¬ 
ering of rustic arbors, but in our vicinity the former 
probably leads. The pleasant custom would seem to have 
been handed down to us by our English forbears, for it 
is alluded to by Shakespeare. Do you not remember in 
“Much Ado About Nothing” in Leonato’s garden, 

“the pleached bower, 

Where honeysuckles ripened by the sun 
Forbid the sun to enter; like favorites 
Made proud by princes, that advance their pride 
Against the power that made it.” 

June 25. —The man who first conceived the idea of en¬ 
circling the trunks of trees with rings of stickiness to 
keep the caterpillars from crawling up into the leaves 
may have thought he had an original idea, but as a 
matter of fact Mother Nature has been doing that very 
thing on some of her plants ever since their creation. 
Growing in neglected fields, or in old country gardens 
sometimes, there is a slender, much-branched herb with 
few leaves but an abundance of minute flowers, soon 
succeeded by swollen green pods of seed. If you gather 
a stalk you will as likely as not feel your fingers stuck 
up by some viscid substance adhering to the stem; so you 
throw that plant away and reach for another. This treats 
you in the same way. Then you look more carefully and 
you find that every one of these plants has a band of some 
purplish, gummy exudation about the stalks below the 
flowers. Stuck fast in these rings are various bugs of low 
degree, obviously all very sorry they came that way. So 

[61] 


A Window in Arcady 

here is another vegetable bug-catcher, like the sundew 
and the huntsman’s cup; but, while those plants con¬ 
sume the insects caught, this one, which is known as the 
catch-fly, has apparently no use for its victim after catch¬ 
ing it. It has been suggested that the object of these 
gummy bands is to prevent crawling insects of the ground 
from reaching and perhaps injuring the flowers, which 
Nature may have designed shall be visited only by insects 
that fly. 

June 28.—Mulberries are ripe, and what with them 
and the cherries it has been flush times lately with the 
birds. Our native American mulberry tree is neither the 
white of silk-worm fame nor the black of Europe and 
literature, but the red. It is a moderate-sized tree, which 
in our neighborhood loves to grow in rich woodlands and 
along fence rows, and, while its fruit is not popularly 
esteemed in this country as the black mulberry is in the 
Old World, it is nevertheless by no means to be despised. 
The berries are in shape like an elongated blackberry, deep 
red in color and juicy and sweet to the taste, but rather 
prosy withal when one thinks of the lively lusciousness of 
such contemporary fruits as the strawberry and the cherry. 
Mulberries rarely find their way to our markets, but the 
country dweller sometimes indulges in a feast of them. 
Since they drop to the ground as fast as they ripen, they 
are best gathered by spreading cloths beneath the trees 
and then shaking the branches, which readily part with 
the ruddy harvest. 

If I were a farmer, I suppose I should not see any 
beauty in the wild carrot, which, originally a visitant here 
[ 62 ] 


The Wild Carrot 


from over the water, has long since worn out its welcome 
and been relegated to the social degradation of a weed. 
Nevertheless, it has its beauties, and now is the time to 
enjoy them, for the flowers are expanding along all the 
waysides. The tiny white blossoms are grouped in round 
flat disks, which are supported by scores of slender green 
rays springing from a common point below, like the ribs 
of an expanded umbrella. These level tops of bloom have 
all the delicacy of lacework, and have doubtless suggested 
the name of Queen Anne’s lace by which the plant is 
sometimes known. With seed time comes a transforma¬ 
tion; then the head assumes a bowl-like shape and grows 
somewhat to resemble a bird’s nest, so “bird’s nest” is 
another common name that has gained some currency. 
The delicately cut leaves of the wild carrot are as grace¬ 
ful as fern fronds, and it is said that in the reign of 
Charles I ladies were in the habit of wearing the foliage 
by way of ornament. 

A curious feature of the wild carrot bloom is that 
the center of the flower head is generally marked by the 
presence of one blood-red floret, turning black eventually 
and producing no good seed—the black sheep of the fam¬ 
ily. Another thing one is apt to find in the flower tops 
is an assortment more or less varied of insects—usually 
sluggish, beetle-like bugs, with their heads buried amid 
the flowers and their hind legs toward the outer world. 
What they find to interest them there is by no means 
apparent, as they are, as a rule, quite motionless. Per¬ 
haps they are philosophers of their race, who retire hither 
for meditation and to gain strength against their next 


[63] 


A Window in Arcady 


sally into a world of pitfalls and vanity. They seem 
quite spiritless, for when you shake the flowers the bugs 
drop dejectedly off, as though they had expected nothing 
better from their lot in life. As a matter of fact, the 
carrot appears to be a favorite mark for many sorts of 
insects, the larvae of which often destroy the roots of the 
garden variety—a form, by the way, which is believed to 
have been directly developed from our wilding weed. The 
root of the wild plant, while possessing the characteristic 
flavor of the carrot, is inedible on account of its woodi¬ 
ness. 

June 30. —From time immemorial May has been the 
poets’ especial favorite among the months, but warm¬ 
hearted June, with a rose in her hair and an ocean of 
daisies surging about her feet, is a rival that presses her 
hard in the affections of the people. And there is this 
advantage that June has—a man may lie on his back on 
the turf, immersing himself in a very bath of grasses, 
with comparative immunity from rheumatism. So lying, 
his eyes, upturned, confront a fact of which in the absorp¬ 
tion of earthly pursuits he is prone to take all too little 
account—the fact that there is a Heaven above him. 

From the sunny sky of June a shadow sometimes falls 
that is not from a passing cloud. We look up and see 
floating in the clear ether a great, dark bird, with wide 
extended pinions fringed at each tip. Now it is motion¬ 
less and drifts with the wind; now it slowly careens to 
one side and now to the other, like a ship on the billows 
of an aerial sea; now its flight is quickened, and, describing 
great arcs of circles, it passes from view. This is the 
[ 64 ] 


Where Wood Robins Sing 


turkey buzzard hunting, and to watch its majestic prog¬ 
ress brings refreshment to a man’s spirit. It seems hard 
to believe that this wanderer in the realms of light is one 
of the disagreeable fowls whose roosts we sometimes come 
upon in our walks afield. Of all filthy spots a buzzard’s 
roost is one of the most disgusting—reeking with foul 
odors and bespattered with offal, a very harpies’ den— 
the scavengers themselves when gorged being stupid, ill¬ 
smelling, scarce able to move and looking the very incarna¬ 
tion of bestiality. Under such circumstances we can only 
retain respect for the repulsive birds by remembering how 
useful their work is. They remove uncleanness which, if 
left, would make many a spot in the world unbearable, 
and if they do overeat themselves it is from a good trait, 
the love of their appointed task. 

It is worth going to the woods after a shower just to 
hear the wood robins rejoice. Their joy that the rain is 
over and gone cannot be restrained. Their song seems 
like a rainbow transmuted into melody. First is a drop¬ 
ping of liquid flute notes that sound to some fancies like 
“e-o-lee,” and to others like “come to me”; then a gurgle 
or two, a trill like a shiver of rapturous delight, and then 
back to the beginning and over again. Usually the song¬ 
ster is hidden from view in the leafy coverts of the drip¬ 
ping tree tops, but occasionally one sees him in the open 
places. A few days ago, after a hard rain, while follow¬ 
ing a woodland road, I looked through a rift in the trees, 
and there, outlined against the clearing sky, was a wood 
robin perched on a dead branch and pouring forth his 
ravishing melody—his head turned now to one side and 

[65] 


A Window in Arcady 


now to the other, like an impartial public speaker ad¬ 
dressing an extended audience. The cracking of a twig or 
the swish of a bush pushed back startled him by and by, 
and, ceasing his song, he betook himself to safer quarters, 
his reddish-brown coat and speckled white vest making a 
dim track of vanishing color through the wood as he 
flew. 


[66] 




JULY 


A Window in Arcady 


July 5. —Of a hot July afternoon, when the air is 
drowsy with the hum of bees, and when the far-off shout¬ 
ing and the tumult of the swimmers down the creek sound 
a lullaby in the ear, one’s rambles are preferably confined 
to earth’s shady places. Along the wood’s edge, which 
casts upon the field a grateful shadow lengthening with 
the afternoon, there is, these summer days, entertainment 
for man and beast—for besides my own intellectual brows¬ 
ings my dog will be busy as a bee on all sorts of wild 
goose chases. There are, for instance, certain profligate 
birds that must be barked at—marauders with beaks deep- 
dyed with cherry and mulberry juice, and flirting their 
impudent little tails just out of reach; there will be 
Mollie Cottontail that must be chased into the brier 
patch; there will be sundry holes in the earth to be bur¬ 
rowed into in the hope of a woodchuck or a mole supper. 
As, for myself, here are the queer little panicled flowers 
of the figwort staring me full in the face, like so many 
aeriel rabbits of Lilliput, with expectant ears straight up. 
Here, too, are the low bushes of the New Jersey tea, of 
patriotic memory, from the leaves of which shrub the cup 
that cheers but not inebriates was often brewed when 
King George was odiously taxing our ancestors’ bohea. 
I like to look close at the dainty clusters of white flowers 
of which each tiny petal is hooded—a very fairy bonnet. 

By the wood’s edge, too, particularly on the side of 
a bank, one of the prettiest of small ferns grows, slim 
and straight as an arrow, its tiny leaflets alertly looking 
this way and that; and if ever a fern had a mission to 
preach uprightness in the earth, this is that fern. It and 


[68] 


The Wood’s Edge 


the poker would be great friends, you would think. Some¬ 
times its erect fronds are seen rising from amid a bed 
of poison ivy, reminding you of some sweet soul that in 
spite of evil surroundings strives resolutely upward to the 
light. The fern’s name is the ebony spleenwort—ebony 
because the stalk and midrib are dark and shining, and 
spleenwort because men used to think ferns of this tribe 
were remedial in diseases of the spleen. 

Now are the childhood days of the nuts which will be 
cracking next fall and winter. It is worth your while, 
when you are so close to the woods, to take a look at them 
in the nursery. The chestnuts are hardly out of long 
clothes yet, for they were still in flower a week or two 
ago, but you will find them snuggling among the leaves 
near the branch tips; shellbarks and walnuts bloomed more 
than a month ago, and these baby nuts now look like fat 
little flasks; it is pleasant to rub them and sniff their 
wholesome, bitterish fragrance. Infant beechnuts are 
bristly little fellows on rather long stalks, and when quite 
young make you think of tiny brushes that have been 
dipped in yellow. They are getting to be big boys now* 
as also are the hazels, which are encased in tight green 
jackets with frills. 

July 8. —It is back in the hills, far from the madding 
trolley gong, that I meet now and then a ginseng hunter. 
It may be he sees me stoop to a plant, and a fellow-feel¬ 
ing prompts him to acquaintanceship; or perhaps he drops 
in upon me as I am weathering a shower in some wayside 
shack, and fellowship in adversity makes, for the nonce, 
of us two one. Not that he divulges at once the fact 

[69] 


A Window in Arcady 


of his vocation; by no means, for ginseng is the most 
select of roots, and sells dried for about $3 a pound. 
He tests me in half a dozen ways, as a trout a suspicious 
worm, before, assured of my trustworthiness, he shows 
me one of the precious forked roots, and bites into it 
for love of its warm, spicy flavor. Like poet and fish¬ 
erman, the ginseng hunter is born, not made. At his 
best he is kin to Thoreau’s famous visitor at Walden 
Pond—that true Homeric or Paphlagonian man. He 
loves the wild life of outdoors for its own wild sake, and 
all elemental things—the sunshine, and the wind, the low 
flying mist, even a dash of rain; uncultured though he be, 
there is that in him which responds blindly to the solem¬ 
nities of the still deep woods, where the rare plant of his 
seeking spreads its palmate leaves and nurses its family 
of small red berries. With the ginseng of the books he 
has no acquaintance; what he knows is “ginshang,” but 
this so familiarly that he has even verbalized it, and speaks 
of its quest as “goin’ ginshangin’.” He will spend days in 
contented search for it, faring dinnerless if need be, and 
sleeping out in the open, until with pockets packed and 
bulging, he returns to his home, lays his spoil on the 
garret floor to dry and takes up again the thread of his 
village life. As other men go fishing, he goes “gins- 
hanging.” 

July 10.—Jack-in-the-pulpit has a cousin that loves 
to live in the sunshine by the river waters. Sometimes 
we find it when we go for water lilies. Arrow arum is 
its name. It is a stemless plant, readily recognized by its 
stately upright leaves with blades shaped like great flat 
[ 70 ] 


The Prose of the Water Lily 


barbed arrow heads, and by its curious flower clusters, 
borne on stout stalks about the bases of the leaves. Each 
flower head is enveloped in a long, pointed hood, which in 
shape reminds one of a lobster’s claw. Down the front 
the hood is split, and through the crinkled folds of the 
opening light and air and ambassadors from the insect 
world find their way into the small flowers which are 
packed about a slender column resembling Cousin Jack 
within his pulpit. 

Although late in the year we often find the ripened 
seeds of the Jack lying about the woods in the most 
slovenly way, the arrow arum’s disposition of its seeds 
is in marked contrast to this. As they mature during 
the summer the stalks that bear them bend downward 
and carefully bury the precious harvest in the mud about 
the plant’s feet, where it remains snug and safe as pos¬ 
sible until spring sets it sprouting. The Indians, who 
were great grubbers of roots, discovered that the big 
root of the arrow arum—it sometimes weighs five or six 
pounds—is edible when baked, so they added it to their 
bill of fare. In the language of some of the Atlantic 
seaboard tribes it was called tuckahoe, a word which 
is familiar to us to-day as the name of a quaint old vil¬ 
lage of southeastern New Jersey, lolling under patriarchal 
trees “where the meadows meet the sea.” 

In spite of the large scale on which the white water 
lilies are picked—bushels of them being daily offered for 
sale on city streets—they are apparently as abundant in 
the ponds as ever they were, while many another wild 
flower grows annually scarcer near large towns. The 

[71] 


A Window in Arcady 


reason is that the water lily is so well rooted in inac¬ 
cessible mud that the gathering of the blossoms in no wise 
harms the plant, which continues to put up fresh growth 
from its undisturbed perennial roots. It is abundant in 
ponds and slow streams throughout the United States 
from British America to the Gulf of Mexico. Readers 
of Longfellow will remember Evangeline’s voyage through 
Louisianian waters, where 

“Water lilies in myriads rock on the slight undulations 

Made by the passing oars.” 

Our pioneer ancestors in their practical way found that 
the water lily, beside its offering of beauty and fragrance, 
possessed qualities of a more material character. Thus, the 
juice was thought to be good for inflammation and burns, 
and the roots used to be gathered by herbalists for vari¬ 
ous purposes, one of which was the composition of a 
cosmetic for ladies—the fresh juice of the root being used 
with lemon juice. The young leaves were to some extent 
a part of the spring menu of country folk and were boiled 
as greens, so the plant often went by the very prosaic 
name of water cabbage, and sometimes cow cabbage, for 
the leaves would also be fed to cattle. The water lily 
flowers have a pretty fashion of going to sleep in the 
afternoon, waking again next morning. 

July 12. —A showy object along our water courses 
lately has been the catalpa—a tree which, like the per¬ 
simmon and the chinquapin, we still know by the name 
the Indians gave it. In late June and early July the 
crowns are white with the attractive flowers which are 
[ 72 ] 


Where Water Lilies Sleep 




























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The Leopard Flower 

borne in generous panicles and are about the latest of the 
year’s tree blossoms to appear. The individual blooms 
remind one of small white sunbonnets frilled at the 
edges, and are handsomely mottled within in purple and 
orange. Sometimes one finds them transformed to ogre’s 
dens by the webs of small spiders, which feed on the flies 
that come there hunting. 

The catalpa as we know it in Pennsylvania is an intro¬ 
duced tree, its native heath being the rich woods of the 
Gulf States. The long seed pods which follow the flowers 
remain on the trees sometimes the year round, and their 
resemblance to extra long “stogies” tempts country boys 
sometimes to smoke them. The wood of the tree is soft 
and weak, but, like Antaeos of classic myth, whose strength 
was great so long as he kept his feet on the ground, it is 
very durable when in contact with the earth, for which 
reason it is a favorite material for railroad ties. 

July 21. —Compatriot of Ah Sin is the pretty leopard 
flower, which I sometimes find sprawling over roadside 
banks these days of midsummer. Its petals are purple- 
spotted on a yellow background—a combination which 
suggests a bit of leopard’s skin, and so the flower’s name. 
Its introduction to this country was as an honored guest 
in old-fashioned gardens, but it has found the conditions 
of life in our Middle States so much to its taste that it 
has taken out naturalization papers and set up house¬ 
keeping for itself—in a timid sort of way, though, for it is 
not yet by any means common as a wild flower. Many 
people know it best by the name of blackberry lily, be¬ 
cause of the seedpods which late in the year split open 

[ 73 ] 


A Window in Arcady 


and expose a cylindrical head of shining black seeds so 
closely simulating a blackberry that it is said that even 
the birds have been known to be deceived by it. Lily, 
however, it is not, but a member of the iris family and 
own cousin to the flags of the meadows. 

Often of a summer evening I meet upon some footpath 
in the field, a country laborer leisurely plodding home¬ 
ward—pipe in mouth, dinner pail on arm and his day’s 
work behind him. Close behind him, too, sometimes jogs 
his dog with drooping tail and dripping tongue, and per¬ 
haps a child or two tagging along, come half way from 
home to meet father. Long after the little procession has 
passed the memory of it lingers with me and I like to 
think of its further progress—of the cottage toward which 
it fares, with a bit of yard in front and probably a white¬ 
washed picket fence with a gate that clicks behind them 
as they pass through. Just above the brow of the hill 
I can catch a glimpse of the roof with smoke rising from 
the chimney. If it is a hot night supper will be on the 
back porch, whence is an outlook through trellised vines 
into the garden. There, after supper, the man will hoe 
and weed while the twilight lasts, the crickets and frogs 
shrilling meanwhile their vesper songs. 

July 26. —Growing in the chinks of a cliff by the river 
I have found a blue bell—the genuine bluebell of Scot¬ 
land and of immortal song. This is, perhaps, the southern 
limit of its range in the eastern United States, for it is 
a lover of the higher latitudes. As we go further north 
we find it more abundant, and along the Delaware in the 
neighborhood of the Water Gap it is quite common. It 
[ 74 ] 


The Azured Harebell 


delights to perch far up on inaccessible cliffs, where its 
lovely flowers nod nonchalantly down at the baffled city 
boarder, who would gather but cannot. 

It is frequent, too, throughout the British Isles and 
Europe, and in England is usually known as the hare¬ 
bell, but why it should be associated with the hare is 
an enigma which has proved so difficult of solution that 
some desperate etymologists claim that the spelling should 
be hairbell—a plausible theory in view of the delicate 
hairlike flower stalks. This pretty flower is one of those 
fairest which Cadwal promised should sweeten the sad 
grave of Imogen: 

“Thou shalt not lack 

The flower that’s like thy face, pale primrose; nor 

The azured harebell, like thy veins.” 

Unemployed philanthropists might find occupation dur¬ 
ing the season of flowers in rescuing unfortunate honey 
bees and bugs of less degree from the pitfalls of the milk¬ 
weed blossoms. If you will examine these flowers any 
sunny day you will be pretty sure to find them decorated 
with a miscellaneous assortment of struggling or dead 
insects, with their legs fast in the slits of the peculiar 
blossoms. The pollen of this common plant, instead 
of being a powder, as in the case of most plants, con¬ 
sists of sticky waxen masses hidden within the blossom. 
When a visiting insect thrusts a proboscis or leg into 
the opening of such a flower some of these masses stick 
to it, and the natural course is for the insect to fly off 
to another flower and fertilize this with the adhering 


A Window in Arcady 


pollen. All insects, however, are not strong enough to 
extract their legs from the sticky places, and then ensues 
the slow torture of hanging there until death or a help¬ 
ing hand releases them from misery. 

Under the name of Virginian swallowwort our road¬ 
side milkweed used to be, and perhaps still is, cultivated 
in English flower gardens. Besides being beautiful it could 
be quite a useful plant if we cared to develop its virtues. 
Thus its milky juice contains caoutchouc; brown sugar 
has been made from the flowers; the silky hairs of the 
seeds are serviceable in the manufacture of textile fabrics, 
as cotton is; and a fibre of good quality for ropemaking 
may be extracted from the stalk. 

July 30. —One of the most interesting phenomena of 
plant life is that of sleep. The approach of darkness 
affects many of our familiar flowers as it does the animal 
creation; they become drowsy, lose their sprightliness of 
habit and are practically out of business until morning. 
The wild oxalis folds its leaflets back to back, reminding 
one of hands folded in prayer, and the clovers are given 
to the same practice. The little yellow-flowered sensitive 
plant, common in old fields and by roadsides, huddles its 
leaflets together as though to keep them warm. Some 
flowers, like the wild rose and the poppy, close their 
petals, and some that do not shut their corollas nod on 
their stalks. 

A pretty sight of the evening is offered by the flowers 
of the fleabane—those small, daisy-like blossoms that have 
been starring the grass fields and waysides for a couple 
of months past. In these the rays stand bolt upright, 
[ 76 ] 







































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The Summer’s Heart 









Sleep of the Flowers 


transforming the flower-head into the shape of a miniature 
tub. It is a pleasant occupation of a summer night to 
observe the behavior of our wild flower friends in the 
dark. Their drowsiness is a touch of nature that makes 
them seem akin to us and gives them a yet firmer place 
in our affections. 


[77] 










AUGU5T 


A Window in Arcady 


August 8 . —Down by the river or along the creek’s 
side, where these August days we go for a whiff of the 
freshness which nature sends into the world by the water¬ 
ways, the arrow-head displays its pretty white flowers 
amid rustling leaves whose characteristic shape gives the 
plant its popular name. This plant, which is distributed 
throughout our country from ocean to ocean and from 
British America to the Rio Grande, has a special interest 
in that its tuberous roots furnished the North American 
Indians with an important part of their diet. The tubers 
are like the potatoes “on Maumee”; they grow small— 
that is, they are about the size of a hen’s egg. They can 
be eaten either boiled or roasted, and the collection of 
them from the muddy depths of the waters in which 
they grow was reduced to a science by the tribes of the 
Pacific coast. There, according to Lewis and Clarke’s 
narrative, the Indian women would push light canoes into 
the ponds where the arrow-head grew, and, standing in 
the water up to their breasts, would work the tubers loose 
with their toes. Thus released the roots would float im¬ 
mediately to the surface of the water, where they would 
be gathered and thrown into the canoes to be trans¬ 
ported ashore to the campfire. 

Humbler beauties are the common cat-tails, which are 
marshaled, millions of them, side by side in roadside 
swamps and marshes everywhere. When the wind stirs 
the long, rapier-like leaves nod and sway and flash back the 
sunlight from their polished surface as from so many 
Damascus blades. If you look closely at these leaves you 
will find that they are not flat in a rigid plane, as you 

[80] 


Riverside Plants 


thought at first, but have a slight spiral twist to them— 
a little natural touch to which much of the varied beauty 
of a cat-tail swamp is due. The dark brown “tails” which 
peep out from amid the green leaves here and there all 
over the marsh are compact seed masses, as you will surely 
learn if you bring some home and stand them in a vase or 
in the hall corner, as many are wont to do. By and bye 
the brown mass splits and the seeds, each in its long cotton 
robe, fluff out and float about the house, to the great an¬ 
noyance of the neat housewife. The flowering of the cat¬ 
tail is in June, and those who desire a store of the decora¬ 
tive material for their apartment do well to gather it very 
early in the summer, before the seeds have matured. 
They then remain fixed in the club-like heads not alone 
for one winter but for many. 

The great bulrush, which grows in similar situations 
to the cat-tail and is sometimes eight or nine feet tall, is 
another interesting plant of the waterways. We shall 
find it in bloom now, a loose cluster of small brownish 
balls at the pointed summit of the round leafless stems. 
The blossom used to be another source of food supply to 
some tribes of Indians, who would beat the pollen off on 
a cloth and make the collected meal into cakes. The princi¬ 
pal use of the bulrush, however, both to uncivilized and to 
civilized men, is derived from its spongy stems, which may 
be woven into excellent mats and baskets. Shakespeare 
devotees who visit Stratford-on-Avon may to this day see 
laborers cutting these rushes out of the waters of the 
classic stream and spreading them on the green banks in 
regular swaths to dry. 


[81] 


A Window in Arcady 


Most curious of our water plants, perhaps, is the eel- 
grass, which grows in quiet waters throughout the eastern 
United States and may be gathered now along our rivers. 
On the Chesapeake it is called wild celery, and is said to 
give the characteristic flavor to the canvasback duck, which 
loves to feed on it. It grows in bunches in the mud of the 
bottom close to shore, and its ribbon-like leaves, sometimes 
six feet in length, float on the stream. The oddity of the 
plant is in its mode of flowering. The flowers are of two 
sexes, of which the females or seed bearers rest upon the 
water and are connected with the root of the plant by a 
long, slender stem. The males, on the contrary, have very 
short stems and are hidden far under water. As the male 
buds mature their stems snap in two and allow the flowers 
to rise to the surface. These decapitated blooms then shed 
their pollen about the expanded seed-bearing blossoms, 
which are thus fertilized, whereupon the long stems coil 
themselves spirally and draw the precious seed-vessels under 
water down into the mud to ripen. This operation is so 
nearly akin to the exercise of real intelligence that it is 
worth one’s while, if he have an opportunity, to watch it. 

August 15.—Stopping recently at a wayside farm, I 
had my attention attracted by the sight of a colony of white 
flowers blooming neither quite in the garden nor quite in 
the field, but in a sort of no-man’s-land between, and 
I was told they were musk roses. On inspection they 
proved to be not roses, but musk-mallows, grown restive 
and inclined to wander out into the wide world. That 
these old garden mallows should be known here as roses 
is an interesting instance of the persistence in rural neigh- 
182 ] 


Osmunda Ferns 
















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Some Floral Etymologies 

borhoods of expressions once universal, but now out of 
vogue and forgotten by most who consider themselves edu¬ 
cated, for time was when the word rose far from being 
restricted to the queen of flowers, was used to signify blos¬ 
soms in general. Thus the guelder rose was, and still is, 
a viburnum, and the corn rose of Britain a poppy. Simi¬ 
larly, the term violet was employed by ancient writers to 
denote many flowers not of the pansy tribe, and in that 
little wild lily, the so-called dog’s tooth violet, the name 
survives to puzzle amateur plant philologists with every 
return of spring. 

There is another bit of etymology awaiting our investi¬ 
gation in the fields and low meadows, which just now are 
frosted over with the flat-topped, whitish flower clusters 
of the thoroughworts. There are half a dozen different 
sorts of these that one may gather in the course of an 
August afternoon’s ramble, best known of which is that 
old stand-by of the herb gatherers, the bitter boneset. The 
scattered leaves of this plant grow in pairs, joined at the 
base, so that the stalk seems to run through them like a 
skewer, and here we have the explanation of that curious 
other name, the thoroughwort, which has come to us from 
old England. There it was once applied to an herb whose 
stalk in the same way grew “thorough” the “wort”—that 
is, “through the herb.” The tonic effect of our plant upon 
the human system when taken in the shape of a tea, putting 
strength, as it were, into one’s bones, appears to be respon¬ 
sible for its commoner name. 

The country, unusually fresh and green this summer, has 
presented few lovelier sights of late than the tasseled corn- 

[83] 


A Window in Arcady 


fields. No wonder that Europeans have been inclined at 
times to grow this stately plant for ornament. Year after 
year it comes to us a gift of surpassing beauty and use¬ 
fulness out of the unknown, for its origin is an unsolved 
mystery. We know to-day no more whence it came than 
Hiawatha did, when, lying half-famished in his wigwam, 
he for the first time beheld it, in the shape of a youth, 

“Dressed in garments green and yellow, 

Coming through the purple twilight . . . 

From the Master of Life descending.” 

White men have never found it growing wild, and it 
would appear to have been a cultivated staple crop among 
the native peoples for centuries before the coming of Co¬ 
lumbus. The early white settlers in adopting it for their 
own use appropriated also the Indian ways of cooking it, 
though these, of course, have been much improved and ex¬ 
tended by Yankee ingenuity. 

The hulled corn of New England is practically the 
samp of the northern Indians, who beat the parched grains 
to remove the hull and boiled the kernels whole. Hominy 
in aboriginal cookery was a similar native preparation, but 
in this the grains were coarsely ground or cracked. The 
corn cakes known as tortillas, and familiar to every traveler 
in Spanish-American countries, are made from ripened corn 
that has first been soaked in lye of wood ashes to soften 
and remove the hulls and then rubbed into a meal be¬ 
tween two stones by Indian women to-day, probably just 
as their ancestors did 1000 years ago, for the same sort of 
stones are found in remains of prehistoric times in Mexico. 
[84] 


Autumnal Heralds 


Even the modern camper’s delicacy, the roasting ear, is 
an inheritance from the Indian. An historian writing of 
Virginia in 1705, speaks of the natives as delighting “to 
feed on roasting ears—that is, the Indian corn gathered 
green and milky, before it is grown to its full bigness, and 
roasted before the fire in its ear. And indeed,” he adds 
naively, as from experimental knowledge, “it is a very 
sweet and pleasing food.” Probably no better way than 
this has been devised for preserving the full flavor. The 
husks are first pulled back to permit the drawing of the 
silk; then they are carefully replaced, and the juicy ear 
is laid in the hot ashes of a wood fire. The result is a 
steaming process, the protecting husks keeping every virtue 
imprisoned while the cooking goes on. 

August 19.—Country outings in latter August are re¬ 
plete with suggestions of the fall. In the tangled grass of 
the orchard, where the early apples are dropping, and in 
the stubble of the brown grain fields the quail cheerfully 
pipes “bob-white” and sets the gunner’s fingers tingling, 
while the rabbits that bound across the road are now so 
plump that to see them is to think of autumnal rabbit pie. 
Every day or two a new aster or golden-rod blinks its 
bright new-opened flowers at us, and already in the swamps 
the hand of autumn is seen in the dashes of scarlet upon the 
rich glossy green leaves of the sour gums—the first of the 
trees to change color. One of the most charming of our 
native trees is the sour gum and deserves a more poetic 
appellation, as, indeed, it gets in New England, where the 
pretty Indian name tupelo is given it. The little blue 
berries which it bears will be ripening in a couple of weeks, 

[85] 


A Window in Arcady 


to the great satisfaction, you may be sure, of Br’er ’Possum 
who finds them mightily to his taste. 

Twice a year the tangled country lane takes on a special 
grace; first, when April spreads a golden mist of bloom 
over the spicewoods and sassafras, and again when the 
early days of autumn come. By this is meant not the 
autumn of the calendar so much as of nature. It is as 
Thoreau says, the fall comes in a night, but we cannot fore¬ 
tell what night. We were languidly aware of its being 
summer yesterday, but this morning, though it may still 
be August by the almanac, there is a new quality in the air, 
and we grow suddenly conscious that the tangles of our 
old lane are blushing with the first colors of the coming 
autumnal glory. Glowing purple within leafy coverts the 
fox grapes hang, and to the damp air of evening their 
musky fragrance lends a delicious sweetness. On bitter¬ 
sweet vine and sugarberry bush the orange-yellow berries 
are set thick, and the sumacs have donned their crimson 
caps and lord it right royally over the humbler golden 
rods. 

The everlastings are in bloom now in the lanes and old 
fields. There are a number of species of these, the small 
white flower-heads of one of which—the pearly everlasting 
—are familiar sights in the make-up of the funeral 
wreaths and crosses of the florists’ shops. The purity of 
the pearly spheres, each surrounding a tiny tuft of golden 
yellow florets, is very captivating. There is an ethereal 
sort of pallor about a patch of these plants in bloom, which 
has probably suggested the fanciful name of “moonshine” 
by which they are sometimes known in the Pennsylvania 

[86] 


The Tonic Wild Cherry 


mountains. More common with us than the pearly ever¬ 
lasting is the sweet life-everlasting, which is easily recog¬ 
nized by its smaller flower heads and a delicious fragrance, 
like that of slippery elm, which exhales from the entire 
plant. It is a peculiarity of flowers of this order that the 
true blossoms are surrounded by a dense involucre of 
chaffy scales almost destitute of moisture, and because of 
this they undergo scarcely any change in the process of dry¬ 
ing and may be kept for years with little loss of beauty. 
Such flowers are common in Europe as well as here, and 
the French know them as immortelles—a term which we 
have imported into our own tongue. 

Now is the time to gather the wild black cherries if you 
are a believer in the old-fashioned tonic that is made by 
soaking this bitter fruit in whisky. There is many a little 
tree along our lane hanging thick with the long strag¬ 
gling racemes of the black pea-shaped fruit. It is plump 
and juicy now, with a characteristic bitterish flavor which 
is very agreeable to many people, and which is almost 
identical with that of peach stones. Birds are very fond 
of these cherries, as well as of the kindred wild species, 
the choke cherry, but when eaten by them to excess it is 
said a sort of intoxication is produced. 

Our bitter wild cherries were not at all to the taste of 
the early English explorers of our land, one of whom, 
writing of them two or three centuries ago, says in disgust: 
“They so furred the mouth that the tongue will cleave to 
the roof and the throat was hoarse with swallowing those 
red bullies (as I may call them), being little better in 
taste. English ordering may bring them to be an English 


[87] 


A Window in Arcady 


cherry, but yet they are as wild as the Indians.” Prob¬ 
ably this testy chronicler referred to the choke cherry, 
which is scarcely edible under the most favorable circum¬ 
stances. 

August 22. —How many northern folk that have read 
James Lane Allen’s romance of the Kentucky hemp fields 
know that the hemp plant is a not uncommon weed in the 
neighborhood of their cities ? It is coming into bloom now, 
and while its blossoms are rather lacking in beauty, the 
delicate fingered leaves are the very embodiment of aristo¬ 
cratic grace. The soul with a feeling of romance cannot 
but be touched at the sight of this historic plant, which 
from time immemorial has been associated with man in his 
economies, his vices, his superstitions. This is the plant 
whose fibres supplied cordage to the navies of Greece and 
Rome and Tyre and to the hangman time out of mind. 
Its resinous secretions form the basis of that drowsy syrup 
of the East, the insidious drug hashish, under whose influ¬ 
ence the mediaeval followers of the Old Man of the Moun¬ 
tain carried out the murderous will of that Oriental chief. 
Called hashishin—that is, the hashish eaters—they gave to 
our language one of its most terrible words—assassin. 
Among the simple-minded to dream of hemp has been 
firmly believed to portend evil, and the seed, besides pos¬ 
sessing its well-known prosaic value as food for canary 
birds, has played an important part in Old World divina¬ 
tion and as a love charm on St. Valentine’s day. 

August 27. —Along fence rows and country lanes at 
this the summer’s end, the elderberry bushes are hanging 
thick with their flat-topped clusters of ripe fruit. One 
[ 88 ] 


A Pond in the Pine Barrens 















































































































































Elderberry Comforts 


often sees from the road the purplish-black berries spread 
out on sunny boards before farm houses to dry, and as stock 
for pies they are much esteemed by old-fashioned folk. 
Some even enjoy the rank tang of the raw fruit, but this, 
like the taste for caviare, is by most of us not acquired in 
a day. 

The elder, indeed, plays a considerable part in the com¬ 
forts of backroad country life. Elderblow tea, made from 
an infusion of the blossoms, is an old standby in many 
families, to be taken hot for certain complaints and cold 
for others. Elderberry wine shares with cider a place in 
some households that hold themselves anti-alcoholic. As 
for the elder wood, with its easily removable pith, is there 
any other so aptly fitted by nature for the construction of 
popguns? 

In mountainous districts there is a species of this shrub 
which bears inedible scarlet berries ripening even as early 
as June, and the red-fruited bushes are then one of the 
striking sights of summer. The elder of England often 
attains the height of a small tree, and has long been associ¬ 
ated with popular superstitions. Its foliage exhales an un¬ 
pleasant odor, and it is said to be dangerous to sleep beneath 
the branches. Popular tradition has it that Judas hanged 
himself on such a tree—a fable which Shakespeare has 
perpetuated in his comedy of “Love’s Labor Lost.” 

Imagination and old sentiments, we have been reminded 
by the genial Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, are more 
readily reached through the sense of smell than through 
other sources. You realize this very quickly when, tired 
by your rambles you stretch yourself out in the grateful 

[ 89 ] 


A Window in Arcady 


shadow of the wood’s edge where dittany and pennyroyal 
grow. As the pungent fragrance of the crushed plants fills 
the chambers of your being you are back in a twinkling— 
you are startled to think how many summers—to your 
childhood’s home among the hills, where this time of the 
year it was one of the season’s special joys to tramp off 
with the family herbalist in quest of plants of virtue against 
the coming winter’s ills. People and incidents you had 
clean forgotten throng back into your memory, and with 
them some aftertaste of that blessed undaunted spirit of 
life’s morning; and the old wholesome times that you 
thought gone forever become for the moment a reality 
again. So in the perfumes of an old field where cattle 
would starve, the spirit of a man may find some drops of 
elixir to renew his youth withal. 

August 31. —When poets sing of the stillness of even¬ 
ing they can hardly have in mind an August night in the 
Middle States, which is indeed somewhat a babel of small 
noises. Strolling homeward in the gathering dusk from 
an afternoon’s ramble in the country one has ample oral 
evidence of the active companionship of nature. There is 
the clamor of the katydids and locusts and the cheerful 
chirping of the crickets, the tree frog’s meditative rattle and 
the solemn croak of his cousin green-back in the pool, and 
pervading all is the subtle hum of the ubiquitous mosquito. 

Now and then the mysterious tremolo of the screech owl 
issues from the shadows of some darkling wood lot, to be 
succeeded, perhaps, by the harsher, insistent demand of the 
whip-poor-will—a note that makes one’s heart jump when 
suddenly uttered near-by. Pleasanter than all, however, is 
[ 90 ] 


The Human Touch 


the watch dog’s honest bark which from afar strikes into 
this wild chorus and tells of the nearness of humanity; 
for whatever the delights of reading the book of nature by 
day, in culling flowers and coquetting by the waterside 
with frogs and fishes, there is that in man’s soul which 
craves when night falls the sound of a human voice, the 
touch of a human hand. 


[91] 





SEPTEMBER 




A Window in Arcady 


September 4.—These early September days are the 
time of the tobacco harvest in our State, and great leaved 
plants spreading to catch the dews of heaven in' the morn¬ 
ing are at night dejectedly swinging by the heels from 
wooden racks in rows of faded green. Occasionally one 
sees in the fields a plant that has been allowed to flower, 
and it is a stately sight—five or siz feet in height, crowned 
with its loose panicle of funnel-shaped rosy blossoms. It 
is said that when the herb was introduced into Spain three 
and a half centuries ago it was at first cultivated for orna¬ 
ment, and, indeed, any garden would be graced by the 
attractive flowers. The living leaves are peculiar in being 
covered with clammy hairs about as disagreeable to the 
touch as were Uriah Heep’s hands. 

Back in those hills where the tobacco grows the stranger 
that you pass upon the road nods to you and wishes you a 
good day, and if you are afoot and do not look too much 
like a tramp you are reasonably sure of being invited to 
share an unfilled seat in a wagon if one overtakes you going 
your way. These are pleasant customs and worth keeping 
up, dictated by the old-fashioned spirit of neighborliness, 
which has all but been crushed out in the self-interested 
hurry and hubbub of city life. 

September 8.—In the woods nowadays there is bloom¬ 
ing a coarse, weedy-looking plant bearing aloft a straggling 
bunch of odd little yellow flowers, each with its tiny mouth 
stretched wide apart and one stamen protruding far out of 
each corner like the antennae of an insect. The blossoms, 
and indeed the whole plant, exhale a most peculiar frag¬ 
rance, which at first strikes you as agreeable and then 
[ 94 ] 






3 » 

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The Riverside’s Tangle 






The Night-Bloomers 


almost nauseates you—a cross between the odor of lemon 
verbena and that of a certain obnoxious bug not mentioned 
in polite society, but which the dictionary tells about under 
the word cimex. The plant is known by many names, 
such as horse-balm, richweed, knotweed and stoneroot. 
The last is suggested by the hard lumpy root, which a 
penknife can scarcely cut into, and which if hammered 
breaks up into flinty fragments like stone indeed. The 
plant has long enjoyed a reputation for medicinal virtue, the 
Indians employing it for the cure of sores and wounds, and 
the whites, particularly in the southern mountains, using 
it in home-made decoctions for fevers, colic and indigestion. 
The bees are very fond of visiting the blossoms, and one 
often sees the big fellows in apparent ecstasy hanging up¬ 
side down from the small flowers, which are borne down by 
the insects’ weight. 

September io. —There is a class of plants which one is 
inclined to think would have been strongly disapproved 
by Julius Caesar, whose liking in men was for *‘such as 
sleep o’ nights.” These are those owls among flowers, 
the night-bloomers, like the evening primrose, which we all 
know both as a garden plant and as roadside weed. 

One of the most beautiful of such flowers of the dark 
that grow wild in America and dispense sweetness to 
prowlers in the night is the white or night-blooming cam¬ 
pion, which blooms with us until the October frosts come. 
It is usually found in waste grounds about seaboard cities, 
where it loves to live in a tangle of old weeds—a dull 
enough place by day, but when the sun gets low filled like 
the night sky with the glory of a thousand eyes. The 

[95] 


A Window in Arcady 


star-like blossoms open rapidly as the light fades, and 
breathe an exquisite fragrance. With the returning day 
they wither or close. 

The name campion is explained by the tradition that 
the flowers of this genus in ancient times were often used 
in chaplets prepared for the brows of champions in athletic 
games. The plant belongs to the same family as the pink, 
which in the days of old Rome was also employed as a 
garland flower, adorning even the temples of the gods. 
Among country people in England the night-blooming 
campion goes by a number of curious popular names, of 
which not the least quaint is grandmother’s nightcap, an 
appellation which has obviously been suggested by the scal¬ 
loped white petals wdiich are set like a ruffle about the 
flower’s eye. 

September 15.—The swamp lured me to-day to its 
depths again. Every man in whose veins there still lingers 
some strain of the primitive wild life of the race has a 
warm spot in his heart for the old swamp. He loves to 
trump up an excuse to go it. It may be for calamus root in 
the early spring, or to watch the red-winged blackbirds at 
their housekeeping, or for grapes in later August, or for 
the winter’s store of boneset or for a shot at a bullfrog. 
So, leading off to the swamp there is always a path, and 
into it, when one goes gypsying through the golden rod 
and purple asters of mid-September, his feet somehow, 
sooner or later, find their way; and, breaking through the 
encircling thicket, they bring him beside quiet waters where 
in the warm sunshine the white water lilies are still basking 
and shedding their exquisite fragrance. Of all flower per- 
[ 96 ] 


The Swamp’s Lure 


fumes none wears better than this: it never cloys but is 
ahvays tonic, feeding the sinews of a man’s spirit. Here 
in the swamp autumnal fires are earliest kindled flaming 
scarlet in the foliage of red maple and sour gum and sumac; 
for the nights fall chill here and it will be in such lowlands 
that we shall see the first hoar frost of the season lying. 

Redder than any color in leaf of trees is the brilliant hue 
of the cardinal flowers which gleam among the browning 
grasses by the water, and with them we shall likely find a 
blossom of duller red, that of the meadow beauty, or deer 
grass as it used to be called in the West. This latter plant 
has a peculiar charm in its seed vessel, which is shaped like 
some slender vase with a flush of rosy color spread over it. 
Interesting, too, are the chocolate brown clusters of the 
groundnut’s flowers, swinging from the bushes over which 
this vine delights to clamber. This, by the way, is not the 
groundnut of commerce, but a kindred plant with an edible 
tuberous root, which has probably only escaped being a 
table favorite because the catalogue of American vegetables 
is already too crowded to make a place for it. 

The swamp is indeed a paradise for vines, among them 
the bur cucumber. This rank-growing plant, swinging 
itself upward and onward by its forked tendrils, covers 
considerable areas with a cheerful coverlet of prosperous- 
looking green. It is an annual and lives its short life mer¬ 
rily; for not only does it attain a great length—sometimes 
even sixty feet or more—in its four or five months of grow¬ 
ing, but it bobs up in all sorts of unexpected places, and, 
not content with its native swamp, pre-empts land that the 
owner had designed for other purposes. Thus, you find 

[97] 


A Window in Arcady 


it springing up, almost in a night, like Jack’s beanstalk, 
in your garden beds or in your back yard if you are a citi¬ 
zen, smothering your choice plants before you well know 
it. The little spiny cucumbers are borne in clusters, each 
bunch of them resembling a burr, whence the popular 
name. They are by no means filled with the cool suc¬ 
culence of the true cucumber, however, being principally 
seed and skin. 

September 19. —The fields and roadsides of autumn 
yield a harvest of wild perfumes to one who cares for such 
homely delights. Some of these, such as the aromatic fra¬ 
grance of the spice bush or of the dittany, are released by 
the mere brushing of our bodies against the bushes, so that 
for a moment all the air is redolent about us; but more 
have to be hand gathered. Thus, the sweet fern, if its 
fragrance is to be properly enjoyed, must be plucked and 
crushed slightly in the palm; so, too, the delicious odors of 
green walnuts and hickory nuts come with rubbing the 
hulls. The goldenrod plant has a decidedly characteristic 
smell, faintly perceived as we pluck the flowers and more 
apparent if we strip the leaves. Like the fragrance of 
chrysanthemums, however, while it is grateful and invigo¬ 
rating to some people it is very distasteful to others. 
Magnolia leaves crushed yield a warm aroma, which 
deepens in the seed pods to a calamus-like quality. 
One of the pleasantest perfumes of the mellowing year is 
that of the cudweed or everlasting, the pearly white plant 
that is now conspicuous in most old fields. There is a 
dreamy suggestion of the fragrance of slippery elm about 
this herb that makes it a delightful nosegay. 

[98] 



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A Pine Barrens Stream 





Ladies’ Tresses 


September 20. —On grassy roadside banks the last 
orchid of the year is now blooming, the odd little flower 
which we know as ladies’ tresses. Sixty odd years ago 
this, with other wildings, seemingly dropped by Proserpine, 
nodded farewell and godspeed to Thoreau as he set off 
upon that memorable week’s voyage on the Concord and 
Merrimac Rivers which was to add a rare volume to the 
world’s library. The greenish-white blossoms are curi¬ 
ously arranged in a spiral around the stalk, a unique charac¬ 
teristic by which the plant may readily be recognized. 
The appropriateness of its common appellation is hardly 
apparent to the practical mind, for ladies, unless they be 
mermaids, do not customarily possess greenish-white tresses. 
An older name for it, still heard in England, is ladies’ 
traces, which may mean the twisted cords used in old times 
for lacing up the feminine bodice. The flowers when 
closely examined are seen to have a delicate frosted look, as 
though the coming event of frosty days were foreshadowed 
in their late-opening chalices. 

Though oak trees are associated in the popular mind 
with massive strength, as a matter of fact some oaks are 
among the most dwarfish of trees. The chinquapin oak, 
for instance, which is abundant in dry soil is a veritable 
arboreal Tom Thumb. In our neighborhood its usual 
height is about three or four feet, but sometimes it is not 
over two feet high, while its maximum is believed to be 
twelve. It is, nevertheless, a charming shrub, and owes its 
name doubtless to its being a miniature edition of its cousin, 
the chestnut oak. At this time of year its acorns are ma¬ 
turing and are borne in remarkable abundance. They 


[99] 



A Window in Arcady 


make an excellent food for hogs and have helped to fatten 
many a porker in South Jersey, where the little tree is very 
common. Between pigs and acorns, indeed, a sort of 
natural affinity has existed from time immemorial. Are 
they not associated in popular proverb, and did not Gurth, 
the swineherd, feed the refractory herd of Cedric, the 
Saxon, on the oak-mast of Sherwood Forest as long ago as 
Ivanhoe’s day? 

Man, too, has found acorns a food not to be despised, 
for, if only the bitterness can be nullified, there is much 
nutriment in them. The Indians discovered that by shel¬ 
ling and peeling them, then pounding them into a meal, 
washing this thoroughly in water and then boiling it, the 
result was a very passable mush, practically free from acrid¬ 
ity. The bitterness may also be partially removed by bury¬ 
ing the nuts for a time in the earth. 

September 25. —Of a still autumnal afternoon, when 
the descending sun is flinging the shadows of the riverside 
trees far into the placid depths of the stream, to walk along 
the banks of our rivers is to participate in a scene of rare 
rural loveliness. It is such a scene as duplicates in kind 
the classic reaches of the English River Lea, where Father 
Walton was wont to angle and contemplate, and whither 
to this day his disciples love to repair. Our river has its 
anglers, too, patient, hopeful men who come out from the 
turmoil of the city’s forging and trafficking to sit on the 
bank with rod and pipe and luncheon done up in a bit of 
newspaper, and, chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy, 
silently bide their luck. Tradition has it that a fish is 
sometimes caught, but eye witnesses to the fact are not 
numerous. 

”%! . 




[100] 


An Up-River Ramble 


Here, within earshot of the city bells, ferrymen still ply 
their trade with row-boat and oar, the superior claims of 
steam and electricity being to them as though they were 
not. Arriving at the water’s edge, if the boat be on the 
other shore, you stand and call “O—ver!” in your most 
robust tones, until, by and by, from among the willows 
across the river, the small craft puts out, with mayhap a 
sunbonneted woman at the oars, and you feel as though 
you had somehow got back to Twickenham Ferry and the 
eighteenth century. 

Another charm of an up-river ramble is when around a 
bend of the stream a couple of staggering mules and a boy 
put in an appearance, and after a while the deep coal-laden 
canal boat which they herald plows by on its silent way 
cityward. The steersman is a picturesque sight, sharply 
defined against the sky as he leans on the tiller, and if the 
lock be near, you may have the delight of hearing him 
blow a mellow blast or two upon the conch shell, which 
usually lies on the hatch in front of him. There is some¬ 
thing quieting in the passing of a canal boat, with its slow 
but sure progress, absolutely without noise or bustle. It is 
the visible expression of a forceful leisure, a dignified sight 
that strengthens you; whereas the hissing and puffing of 
steam or the sputter of electricity communicates somewhat 
of its own unrest to your spirit. 


[101] 






OCTOBER 




A Window in Arcady 


October 2. —October is a month of fruit rather than 
of flowers, but there is at least one wild blossom that we 
find in perfection this month, and of all Flora’s train it is 
one of the quaintest. This is the sneezeweed, which 
revels in the alluvial soil along the margins of streams, 
and is- readily recognized by the little round balls of cen¬ 
tral bloom surrounded by a circlet of drooping yellow rays. 
A side view of this blossom reminds one of a tiny straw hat 
with the brim pulled down all around. It is a lover of 
cool weather, almost rivaling the garden chrysanthemum 
in this respect, and may be found blooming even in No¬ 
vember. Its very unpoetic name is derived from the fact 
that the dried flowers and leaves possess the property of 
inducing violent sneezing. On this account the plant has 
a place in medicine, for some of the ills that flesh is heir 
to are relieved by a good, honest sneeze or two rightly 
timed. 

After a long summer spent in the comparative obscurity 
of commonplace green, our democratic friend, the poke- 
weed, has donned the imperial purple, and is making a 
brave show in fence rows and by the borders of woods. 
Its robust stems and branches are full to bursting with 
the rich color, which has flowed down the mid-rib of the 
leaves and overrun into the blades. The branches are now 
loaded with their racemes of black berries, the crimson 
juices of which we prized as children for the manufacture 
of what we were pleased to call red ink—a most illusive 
fluid, the only virtue of which was that it cost nothing, for 
it would keep no trust reposed in it and would fade in a 
short time quite off the paper. The pokeweed, like the en- 


[104] 


Picturesque Lanes 


terprising American that it is, has even invaded Europe, 
where it has become naturalized in the basin of the Medi¬ 
terranean, and where the thrifty natives have found a use 
for it in the adulteration of wine. It is a plant full of 
energy, as is evidenced by its still blooming, although 
borne down with fruit and Jack Frost like a sword of 
Damocles hanging over its head. New Englanders know 
it under the name of garget, which is a rather more digni¬ 
fied term than poke, although both names appear to be 
incomprehensible to our philologists. 

The word poke is perhaps of Indian origin, but the 
plant which we know specifically as the Indian poke is of 
quite another family, being a rank plaited-leaved weed of 
swamps and low grounds, the leafy stems of which are 
topped in early summer with great pyramids of dingy yel¬ 
low flowers. Indian poke is quite poisonous, a fact well 
known to the red men, who, it is said, sometimes turned 
the quality to account in selecting their chiefs—the can¬ 
didate who could imbide most of the poison and survive 
being regarded as born to leadership. 

October io. —The lanes are now among the most pic¬ 
turesque of sights, and offer much entertainment to one 
who has a taste for enjoyment on a low key—to use John 
Burroughs’ phrase. Among our hills there are many such 
pleasant lanes, half hiding between stone walls and fences 
that are buried in clambering vines, now skirting woodland 
or orchard, now winding up hill and along the ridges by 
cornfields and turnip patches, and now descending into 
little dales that carry in their laps brawling streams to 
feed the river. 


[105] 


A Window in Arcady 


In such places, these October days, we find the climbing 
bittersweet in abundance. This characteristic American 
vine, which dearly loves to climb a tree, is shyness itself 
in spring and summer; its flowers are so unassuming that 
they are rarely ever observed, and its foliage is of so con¬ 
ventional a pattern that it passes equally unnoticed in the 
general green livery of the wayside. But suddenly in 
the fall it flames upon our startled sight with showy 
bunches of orange-colored berries, which after a hard frost 
burst open and glow yet more ardently because of the fiery 
red-coated seeds which are within. Bittersweet berries 
retain their brightness indoors for months, particularly if 
gathered unopened before the frost touches them, and are 
among the most cherished of decorations in some rural 
homes. The vine is a famous contortionist, and often 
twists and doubles upon itself to a remarkable degree. 
To-day I gathered a spray of it that had tied itself into a 
loose knot. 

Common along the fence rows is a shrubby relative of 
the elm, the sugarberry, which, like Corp, the friend of 
Sentimental Tommy, has a pronounced tendency to warts. 
These knotty protuberances, which often stud the leaves 
so thickly as to be an actual deformity of the foliage, are,' 
like oak galls, due to the egg deposits of insects. The 
sugarberry shrubs are easily detected in the lanes at this 
season of falling leaves by the numerous reddish-brown 
berries set solitarily upon the twigs, where they remain 
throughout the winter if the birds do not eat them— 
crusty little beads by no means distasteful to human 
palates, too, owing to the presence of a sweetish pulp be- 

[106] 




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An October Wayside 







Persimmon History 


tween the large single stone and the enveloping dryish rind. 

Our old lane will probably yield us a persimmon tree 
or two, and it is pleasant to look up into the thinning 
leaves and see clinging to the limbs the round, fat per¬ 
simmons, like rosy little puddings tied about the throat. 
There has hardly been frost enough yet to soften their 
asperities, and we shall do well to treat very gingerly the 
fruit we may now find upon the ground. Something of 
the old malicious spirit lingers in persimmons which was in 
that strange fruit, sardo, that grew anciently in Sardinia 
and so contorted the faces of those who ate it as to give to 
them a look of unreal laughter and so to human speech 
the adjective sardonic. 

Nevertheless, few wild fruits are so dear to the Ameri¬ 
can heart as this, which with many of us is associated with 
wholesome country outings and good times, and has a 
special place in popular song and story. It may not be 
generally known that ebony is the wood of certain species 
of persimmon trees that grow in tropical regions. Our 
North American variety, while presenting in its heart- 
wood—which is dark and close-grained—some character¬ 
istics of the ebony of commerce, does not develop a timber 
of much value. 

October 20. —The autumn rains have served to keep 
the pastures quite green, late as it is, but rusty brown 
patches appear here and there. These are not altogether 
the effect of withering vegetation, but in many places are 
due to the presence in great abundance of a curious little 
plant called the clammy cuphea, a country cousin of the 
familiar cigar plant of old-fashioned gardens. It bears 

[107] 


A Window in Arcady 


small flowers of a deep magenta color, and a purplish, 
sticky fuzz that clothes the whole plant makes it very 
disagreeable to handle. The odd feature of the cuphea, 
and one which any one may observe, is the way it ripens its 
seeds. The capsule, instead of staying fast shut until the 
seeds are mature and ready for sowing, splits open while 
they are still green, and, exposed to the elements in this 
Spartan fashion, they grow to ripeness. 

If we have ever wondered why cockle-burrs and Spanish 
needles and beggarticks and all that vagrant fraternity of 
stick-tights that pester us in the fall are so widely dis¬ 
tributed in the earth we shall do well to notice the cows 
of an autumn evening as they come home from a day’s 
foraging in some weedy pasture. Their hides are often 
stuck as full of them as pincushions with pins. Rubbing 
off in stall and barnyard, the seeds eventually become a 
part of the compost heap, which in due time may be 
shipped scores of miles away to fertilize fields in another 
State, and, the seeds germinating there, their progeny will 
by another fall be at the old tricks of the family—stealing 
rides on folk and cattle. 

October 28. —That man must be a hardened citizen, 
indeed, who on a fine October morning does not feel the 
country tugging at his heart-strings and inviting him to 
take a day off and go nutting. For now is the delectable 
time of year when nuts are dropping, when “the frost is 
on the pumpkin and the corn is in the shock,” and the 
air is spicy with the fragrance of the cider press; when 
quail and rabbits scurry about at their plumpest, blissfully 
ignorant of the nearness of the fateful First of November; 
[ 108 ] 


When Nuts Are Dropping 


and when the blackbirds in the treetops are holding those 
wonderful conventions of theirs, their jargoning being as 
the creaking of innumerable wagons. 

The ideal day for nut gathering is a windy one after a 
frosty night, and you would better be afoot betimes, or the 
squirrels will have had the pick of the windfalls, for 
windfalls, if you are wise, are what you are after. Club¬ 
bing the trees not only turns your sport into labor, but 
is injurious to the trees and altogether brutal. There is 
hardly any shorter cut back to the youth of the world than 
this scratching for the brown nuts among the fallen leaves 
and green mosses of the woodland floor. Each one found 
whets the appetite for more, until you are prouder of your 
bulging pockets than you were yesterday of a lucky turn on 
the market. 

This year chestnuts, the popular favorite among nuts, 
seem scarce, but the yield of shellbarks is abundant. The 
hickory tribe, of which the Eastern shellbark and the 
pecan of the Mississippi Valley are the most esteemed as 
nut-bearers, are among the most interesting of our native 
trees. America has a monopoly of them, for they do not 
grow in the Old World. The peculiar character of the 
wood is its elastic toughness, which has passed into a pro¬ 
verb. This quality makes the hickory very valuable in 
the manufacture of agricultural implements, while as fuel 
for an open fire it has probably promoted more waking 
dreams and pleasant reveries than any other wood of our 
forests. The Indians, who knew a good deal more about 
some of our native products than we do, found that by 
pounding the nuts, putting them in boiling water and then 

[109] 


A Window in Arcady 


passing the mass through a strainer, the result was an oily 
liquid said to be as sweet and rich as cream. This was used 
as an ingredient in aboriginal corn cakes and hominy, and, 
on the authority of the immortal Captain John Smith of 
schoolboy memory, was called by the Virginia Indians 
pawcohiccora; whence, by our American fashion of making 
short work of long names, our modern word hickory. 

Perhaps the most neglected of our American nuts, yet 
certainly one of the choicest, is the beech nut. These nuts 
are borne at the branch tips in spiny little husks, which 
crack open in October and disclose within two triangular 
nuts, each about the size of a small chinquapin. Un¬ 
fortunately, in our neighborhood the nuts are very fre¬ 
quently either undeveloped or wormy, but the perfect ones 
are well worth looking for, as the meat is of delicious 
sweetness. In eating them one needs a knife to slice off 
one side of the angled shell, and then the kernel falls easily 
into the hand. 

By the wood’s edge, where the sunshine lies warm and 
mellow, the hazels have been lately dropping their nuts, 
and, strange to relate, preparing for another year by put¬ 
ting on their next spring’s catkins. They know enough 
about the weather, however, to keep their infantile mouths 
tight shut until winter is over, and so are preserved from 
death by freezing. The field violets over the fence are less 
prudent, and an occasional blue blossom nods jauntily at 
us as we pass, as though it knew all about the weather, and 
this were just as good a time to blossom as next May; but 
with the night will come a frost to nip its tender leaves 
of hope. 


[110] 












NOVEMBER 




A Window in Arcady 


November i. —One must be hardened, indeed, not to 
lose his heart to that neatest of wild shrubs, the sassafras— 
true lover of the fence row and abandoned field. Some¬ 
times we find it in its proportions a small tree; indeed, in 
our Southern States it often attains the height of a large 
tree, and in colony days the exportation of the logs was 
something of a trade item. There is no season when the 
landscape is not the better for its presence. In spring, 
when covered with its lemon-yellow blossoms, appearing 
before the leaves, it looks from afar like an exaggerated 
golden rod; in summer its dense, flat-topped crown of 
verdure is coolness personified; in the fall, when leaves are 
turning, it is brilliant in tones of yellow and red. It is 
pleasantly aromatic in all its parts, but particularly in 
the root, which is dear to most Americans that have 
ever lived in the country, as the essence of that delectable 
beverage of childhood, root beer. 

In olden times great was sassafras in the family pharma¬ 
copoeia. A specific for ague, as well as for sundry other 
ills, it used to command extravagant prices not only in the 
colonies, but in the mother country, which, mother-like, 
took considerable pride in our products, even if she did 
tax us pretty roundly. The leaves are sometimes cleft at 
one side into the shape of a thumb, so that in your country 
walks when you come upon a little tree that astonishes 
you by appearing to wear mittens you may be sure you 
have met the sassafras. There is a curious story that it 
was the fragrance of this tree wafted out upon the waters 
that encouraged Columbus to persist in his westward voy¬ 
age in the face of the protests of his mutinous crew. 


[112] 


Two Sorts of Hazels 


November 7.— These are bright November days and 
now the woods have a look that one sees in them at no 
other time of year. They are filled with a strange, un¬ 
earthly light—the pale sunshine reflected from myriads of 
brilliantly colored leaves that strew the ground and are 
still falling. It is a fit setting for that weird last blos¬ 
som of the year, the witch hazel, whose snaky lemon-yel¬ 
low petals are bristling now on bare, straggling branches. 
These are the branches which from time immemorial pro¬ 
vided country water finders with their choicest switches 
wherewith to point to hidden springs. 

The true hazel, which bears some resemblence to its 
uncanny namesake, is easily distinguished from the latter 
by straighter branches and a more upright habit. It is 
a more sociable plant, too, loving to grow in clumps along 
the borders of the woods. Even at this late date I find 
clinging to the twigs and gayly defying the chill night 
winds a nut or two in ragged brown jacket with the lapels 
thrown jauntily back, reminding me of some dashing out- 
at-elbow cavalier of comic opera. Encouraged by such 
luck, I search industriously among the leaves for the nuts 
that must have dropped, but all that I find have a big hole 
in one end and the meat is gone. Derisive chatter from a 
neighboring tree and the flourish of a bushy tail disappear¬ 
ing around the trunk incline me to believe that my discom¬ 
fiture has added somewhat to the gayety of bunnydom. 

Two orchids of our woods are preparing to spend the 
winter with us. The commoner of the two is the rattle¬ 
snake plantain. This has small, fat leaves of a velvety 
green color beautifully reticulated in white, which are 

[113] 


A Window in Arcady 


usually found growing close to the ground in clusters 
partially under the cover of the woodland litter. Like 
many of our native plants it once enjoyed some repute as 
an antidote to the dreaded rattlesnake bite, whence the 
common name. It is said to have been regarded by the 
Indians as so sure a cure that they would from bravado 
allow rattlers to bite them if they had a supply of these 
orchid leaves at hand to apply to the wound. 

Our other winter orchid, one which is now reckoned as 
a rarity in our neighborhood is popularly known as Adam- 
and-Eve. It is readily recognized at this season by its 
solitary silvery green leaf of a parchment-like texture 
prominently ribbed and wrinkled, which, if all go well, 
will outride the storms of winter and die only when the 
plant blooms next May. The leaf springs from an under¬ 
ground bulb, shaped like that of a crocus, and this will 
always be found united by a horizontal shoot to the bulb 
of the previous year, wherein lies the significance of the 
name. Last year’s bulb we may reasonably assume to 
be Adam, from whom by a rib put forth, Eve is formed. 

November 15.— One is prone to think of fishing as the 
contemplative man’s special recreation, but as a matter of 
fact to sit on a log in the woods at this time of year is 
quite as prolific of quiet enjoyment, if one have an easy 
mind, a half holiday, and eyes that see and ears that hear. 
At no season are woodlands lovelier than now before the 
heavy snows have come. The sunlight fills them com¬ 
pletely and brightens up their thick carpet of dry leaves to 
a warm, ruddy hue, as cheerful as the glow from a hearth, 
while upon the frosty air is borne a various music. Now 
[ 114 ] 






















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A Hemlock Slope 


Woodland Sounds 


it is the ringing of horses’ iron-shod hoofs upon the distant, 
hard turnpike, now the hum of the country trolley car, 
now the frenzied barking of dogs in hot pursuit of a 
rabbit, now the sharp concussion of the wood chopper’s 
ax and its quick following echo. That sound, like a bung 
drawn suddenly from a barrel, is the discharge of a far-off 
hunter’s gun, mellowed by distance. There is in these 
humble noises the raw material of real poetry; as we heed 
them and let them sink into our consciousness they reach to 
the red earth in us, the Adamic part, which finds a zest in 
all rural sights and sounds, and which lingers in most of 
us an inheritance from a time before cities were. 

We may have thought when we came into our wood 
that it was deserted of life, but we do not sit long on our 
log before we find company. There are sparrows among 
the dry leaves that strew the brook side, and they are busy 
rustling them in their search for seeds or whatnot, keeping 
up a monotonous melancholy chirp the while, that works 
on one’s feelings. A woodpecker makes his way up the big 
chestnut in front of us, hammering melodiously as he goes, 
and when he gets high enough, backs methodically down 
again. Perhaps, too, we shall have a sight of that most 
charming of our winter birds—the nuthatch, which like 
the woodpecker also picks a living from tree bark. It 
should be tonic to sluggards to watch this little bird en¬ 
gaged in getting dinner. Industriously it searches for 
insect eggs in every likely crevice from root up and then 
turning about it descends headfirst over the same route 
to make sure it missed nothing. This odd way of 
coming down a tree trunk is a characteristic of the 


[115] 


A Window in Arcady 


nuthatch and makes it very easy of identification in winter. 

Another busy bird in the winter trees is the brown 
creeper, which invariably begins at the lower part of the 
tree and works upward, then flies downward to the base 
of another tree and starts up again. Unlike the nut¬ 
hatch it takes no chances of a rush of blood to the head. 

November 20. —In our country rambles we sometimes 
notice a neat little pile of feathers and bones bleaching 
upon the ground in the woods or by a fence, and, if we are 
disposed to speculate upon its reason for being, we prob¬ 
ably pronounce it the remains of a worn-out bird that has 
fallen dead by thfe way long ago. As a matter of fact, 
these deposits represent what is left of some unlucky 
sparrow or tom-tit after an owl has breakfasted upon him. 
Master Owl’s table manners are by no means of the po¬ 
litest, and when he captures his prey he simply swallows it 
whole at one gulp and sits solemnly upon his perch until 
his digestive apparatus has assimilated all of that parti¬ 
cular bird that is good for an owl. That point reached 
he opens his mouth and ejects from it in a small wad the 
indigestible bones and feathers which have attracted our 
attention, and then, like Oliver Twist, he is ready for 
more. 

Now, that the leaves have fallen from deciduous tree 
and shrub, many a plant becomes conspicuous that we 
passed by unnoticed in the leafy season. Among such 
not the least picturesque is one which country people still 
call by the name the Indians gave it, the pipsissewa. It is 
a low evergreen, with glossy foliage, common in wood¬ 
lands, and so great faith had the aborigines in its medicinal 
[ 116 ] 


Wild Harvests 


virtues that the fame of it spread among the whites, who 
adopted the plant name and all as a home remedy. It 
really has some tonic value, being bitter and astringent, and 
is collected by herb gatherers to this day wherewith to 
make a tea for coughs and colds. The seed-vessels remain 
on many of the plants throughout the winter. Held aloft 
on the slender stalks they make a very graceful study, 
reminding one of burned-out candelabra that may have 
lighted fairy revels on midsummer nights. 

Another species of pipsissewa, bearing dull-green leaves, 
streaked with white, is also abundant in winter woods. 
For some reason the herb collectors in South Jersey regard 
it as poisonous—a reputation quite unwarranted by the 
facts so far as generally known. The botanical name of 
both species, by the way, is an unusually beautiful one, in 
view of their hardy way of life—“chimaphila,” meaning 
the winter loving. 

The yellow-flowered, prickly cactus, that grows wild 
in sandy places throughout the Atlantic seaboard States, 
is now decked with its ripened fruit and making evident 
to all who see it the reason for the plant’s popular name of 
prickly pear. The fruit is a purplish berry shaped like a 
small pear, and, though very full of seeds, is edible and 
even pleasant to the human palate, possessing something of 
that thirst-quenching quality which makes the cactus 
family of such great economic importance in the deserts of 
the Southwest. 

Like miniature red-cheeked apples are the crimson hips 
of the swamp rose, sprays of which brought home from a 
November ramble make the house as cheerful as with 


[117] 


A Window in Arcady 


flowers. After being touched by the frost the wild rose 
hip becomes sweet to the taste, and is a dainty morsel to 
birds and sundry small deer in winter. It has even been 
of some account in the diet of the Indians, particularly in 
the far Northwest, where there is at least one species of 
rose which bears fruit that is comparatively large and 
juicy. 

November 29. —Before entering upon her winter slum¬ 
bers, Mother Nature makes a beginning at her spring 
work, as a thrifty housewife the last thing at night hangs 
the cream kettle outside the kitchen door and sets her bis¬ 
cuit to rise. So as we tramp about the woods and “fields 
these days of the fall of the leaf we shall see many things 
that point to spring. Arbutus, for instance, is already in 
bud, and the alder shrubs are loaded with clusters of 
close-fisted catkins, hoarding golden pollen subject only 
to the order of next year’s sun. Some of the other plants, 
however, are more secretive. To look at the hepatica and 
the wild ginger you would think they considered one year 
at a time enough for them, for they give no outward token 
of preparing for spring. Nevertheless, if you thrust your 
finger into their loamy bed you will find buds started 
underground, inclosing baby flowers in their winter wraps. 


[118] 


DLCLMBLR 



A Window in Arcady 


December 15. —If you are disposed to think that 
winter marks the death of the year you should take a 
closer look at the trees. What though Jack Frost has 
locked fast the ponds and lesser streams and goes royster- 
ing about the country with his boon companion, the north 
wind? Set thick upon the trees are the young buds of a 
new year’s life—hope’s candles to keep us in cheer until 
the spring comes. Almost all the trees have their buds 
set, and if you have a friend who is disposed to talk about 
these being melancholy days, you can hardly do better 
than show him the heralds of spring resident upon the 
twigs. The branch that Noah’s dove brought back across 
the waste of waters was not more truly a harbinger of 
the return of better times than are these winter twigs 
of our forest trees. The bud usually appears in the axil 
of the old leaf stalk or near it, but an interesting varia¬ 
tion from this is made in the case of the buttonwood 
Here the bud is produced in hiding directly beneath the 
base of the leaf stalk, which fits like a cap upon the 
pointed head of the bud and finally falls off, leaving the 
latter bareheaded in a cold world. 

People are apt to give but scant attention to these win¬ 
ter buds, which are often very beautiful and characterized 
by the same marvelous variety that is upon all Nature’s 
handiwork. The buds of the white oak, for instance, 
are small, blunt excrescences, while those of the hickory 
are good-sized pointed cones, in shape reminding one 
of the sharp iron plugs of our boyhood’s tops. The 
beech buds, in tones of light chestnut, are an inch long, 
slender and delicately pointed like a lance head, while 

[120] 


Winter Buds 


the tulip tree’s are a dark crimson, clothed in a. frosty 
bloom and beveled down at the tip like a chisel. The 
twigs of the dogwood are terminated by round, flat buds 
in gray, as a fencing foil is capped by its button; and the 
great brown buds of the horse chestnut, as every one 
knows, are shingled like a roof and covered neatly with 
a protective coat of varnish. Indeed, so well marked are 
the characteristics of the winter buds that an expert can 
often distinguish by them one species from another with¬ 
out the aid of leaf or flower. 

No one who loves the trees can afford to miss acquaint¬ 
ance with them in their winter moods, when they are no 
less beautiful than in summer and when the absente of 
leaves lets us into their more secret places. 

December 20. —One of the very conspicuous native 
trees at this season is the buttonwood. The bald trunks 
from which the bark scales in great patches gleam white 
for long distances in winter, and readily distinguish the 
tree from every other. The curious habit of shedding its 
bark is due to the expansion of the trunk’s girth as the 
tree grows; but, while the bark of other trees is contin¬ 
ually stretching a point to meet the demands of growing 
hosts, that of our sycamore is inelastic and unaccommo¬ 
dating, and so gets constantly pushed off the tree—a type 
of the old fogy among men who refuses to adapt himself 
to the changing needs of the time. Sycamore seeds are 
more fortunate. They are borne in compact balls, which 
swing by long stems from the upper boughs from autumn 
until spring. A branch or two of these dangling button- 
balls make a novel and interesting indoor decoration direct 
from Nature’s workshop. 


[121] 


A Window in Arcady 


Another showy tree in winter is the tulip poplar, from 
whose magnificent columnar trunk, straight-grained and 
soft, the Indians were wont to make their dugout canoes. 
The seed vessels are large cones, consisting of numerous 
long-winged seeds packed around a central axis. These 
seeds are scattered abroad by the winds of autumn and 
early winter, leaving the bare axis standing in a hollow 
bowl of yellowish brown scales, which the sun of a winter 
afternoon vivifies to a pale gold. A treeful of them is one 
of the pleasant sights of a country ramble at this season. 

Perhaps the most striking of our roadside trees in win¬ 
ter, however, is one which is covered with upright panicles 
of yellowish flower-buds, mingled with gaping seed pods 
shaped somewhat like English walnuts. Examine these 
buds and you will find them apparently encased in buck¬ 
skin, through which the frost has no power to penetrate, 
but which the springtime sun will cause speedily to fall 
away and reveal to the world a wealth of violet purple 
blossoms. This showy tree is the paulownia, a native of 
Japan, from which country it was introduced many years 
ago for the adornment of lawns and city streets, where 
it is still more often seen than in country fence rows. 
Its stately name perpetuates the memory of a Czar’s 
daughter, Anna Paulowna, child of the despotic Musco¬ 
vite, Paul the First. 

In winter our admiration of the familiar sumac bushes, 
whose foliage puts a special strain of brightness in the 
autumnal coloring of old fields and roadsides tangles, re¬ 
ceives a fresh impetus. Against the white background of 
the desolated earth they now stand out in decorative out- 


[122] 









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By the Winter Sea 





A Tavern in the Pines 


line, with upright, pyramidal clusters of velvety crimson 
berries topping the writhing branches. An armful set in 
a big jar in a sunny corner of the library will fill the 
room all winter long with outdoor memories. 

December 27. —These winter days my lungs pant 
sometimes for a breath of the pines. It is something of 
a journey thither and I like to go down the night before 
and sleep at an old-fashioned hostelry in the woods. There 
sitting for an hour or two before bedtime planted as Tom 
o’ Shanter was, “fast by the ingle bleezing finely,” I like 
to get acquainted with my fellow-men of the pine belt— 
hewers of pine and drawers of cedar, charcoal burners and 
gatherers of peat-moss; doughty Nimrods all, full of 
strange stories of great game killed and of greater that got 
away. Then, when 10 o’clock comes, I take my lamp up to 
a fireless room and tuck myself away under covers a foot 
thick, while the northwest wind, battling against the 
rampart of pines that hem the inn about, roars me to 
sleep. 

The stars are still shining in the sky when a pounding 
at the door calls me downstairs, where I perform my ablu¬ 
tions in a tin basin at the kitchen door, rub my face into 
a glow with a crash towel, and sleek my locks with a 
veteran comb that hangs by the bit of looking-glass near 
the window. I am the only guest, so I am sure of the 
warm seat by the stove at breakfast—and such a break¬ 
fast! There are for piece de resistance fat, juicy saus¬ 
ages, cracking their chestnut sides with geniality, and 
brown buckwheat cakes hot off the griddle and almost 
as round as the same, their entrancing vapors mingling in 

[123] 


A Window in Arcady 


midair with the aromatic steam that rises from the coffee 
pot at my elbow. So fortified, I am ready to fare forth 
by frozen paths to meet the sun, already sending yellow 
shafts of light through the silent aisles of the woods. 

Few people realize the wealth of color which the pine 
barrens hold even in midwinter, and which is revealed on 
a sunny day. This color is due principally to the pre¬ 
valence of evergreen plants whose foliage the frost turns 
to many shades of crimson and yellow and green. There 
are verdant banks of laurel streaked with the scarlet of 
the season’s twigs, and inkberry bushes in blue-black. The 
tiny green leaves of the sand myrtle are lit up by the sun 
with sparkles of white light reflected from them as from 
so many little mirrors, the cranberry vines, fast in the 
embrace of the marsh ice, stand blushing deep crimson, as 
though ashamed of having been so caught, and the minia¬ 
ture forests of teaberry make splashes of dull red over the 
ground, with here and there a flash of scarlet where a 
berry shows. In great patches of emerald green or sul¬ 
phur yellow the mosses of the upland sands grow, but in 
the swamps the spongy peat-moss is dyed in exquisite 
shades of red and old gold and looks like a rich carpet. 

Rarest of all treats to the eye, however, in these flower¬ 
less days is the sight of the open marshes and savannas, 
where, ringed about by the dark-green pines, the cassandra 
bushes are gathered into billowy lakes of foliage. The 
leaves of this shrubby little plant, which covers great areas 
in open bogs and in the wet grounds along the pine barren 
streams, are in winter the dullest of dead browns, dotted 
with minute points of gray. In cloudy weather no one 


[124] 


The Deserted Cabin 


would think of these bushes as beautiful; but let the sun 
shine upon the brown billows and they are transformed in 
a twinkling to such a glory of warm, vivid auburn as 
fairly takes my breath away, and humbles me by a revela¬ 
tion of beauty that seems let down from heaven. 

After walking for miles in these piney stretches and 
seeing no sign of man I come upon a weed-grown clearing, 
where, amid brambles and scrubby sassafras and suckering 
white poplars, a deserted cabin stands—the home afore¬ 
time of human beings who sought there to wrest a living 
from the sand. The roof sags in, bowed by the burden of 
many a winter’s snows; the floor is crazy and rotting; 
where windows once were are now but gaping sockets. Is 
this the forgotten grave of some family’s buried hope, or 
is it an abandoned stepping-stone to better things? 

Standing in the crumbling doorway I note amid the 
desolation two simple things that touch within me a tender 
chord. One is a corner cupboard, its broken door reveal¬ 
ing a cozy top shelf that surely lodged that solacer of 
housewifely care, a tea pot. Daily for how many hum¬ 
drum years has it not come down from that top shelf on 
its kindly mission to tired femininity! And the other is 
a blackened hearth, where fire once blazed. There the 
kettle must have sung, and of a cold night weary feet 
were stretched out to gather warmth and comfort; by its 
fitful gleam perhaps some Hampden of the pines or mute, 
inglorious Milton may have conned his humanities. So in 
the depth of the wildwood is a tongue to speak of home to 
the traveler and keep his heart warm. 


[125] 






ENVOY 













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ENVOY 


The year is done; frostbound and chill 
Lie all those pleasant paths we trod; 

Thou mindest not; thy feet , dear love , 

Tread heavenly ways with God. 

Before the embers of my fire 

That lights the hearth which thou didst bless 

I sit alone tonight , bereft 
Yet not all comfortless. 

Though thou art vanished , faith abides 
That He who of us twain made one y 

Parting our hands , binds still our souls — 

Has not His work undone. 




I 


















f 




INDEX 


Page 

Acorns,.27, 99 

Adam-and-Eve, . . 114 

Arrowhead,.80 

Autumn heralds, ... 85 

Beechnuts,.1 10 

Berrying in winter, . 16 

Bittersweet, .... 106 

Bluebells,. 74 

Bulrush,.81 

Buttonwood, . . 45, 121 
Buzzards,.64 

Campion, evening . 95 

Carrot, wild.63 

Catalpa,.72 

Catchfly,.62 

Catkins,.23 

Catnip.12 

Cattails, .80 

Cherries, wild . . . .87 

Chickweed,.1 1 

Clammy cuphea, . . .107 
Corn, green and dried, . 84 
Cucumber, burr ... 97 

Dandelions,.36 

Dog’s tooth violet, . .34 


Dutchman’s breeches, . 3 1 

3 2 


Page 

Eelgrass,.82 

Elderberry,.88 

Everlastings,.86 


Ferns, .... 26, 35, 68 

Ginger, wild.38 

Ginseng hunter, 69 

Grapes, wild.59 

Grasses, winter ... .13 
“Greens”, wild ... 30 

Hazel, . . . 110, 113 

Hemp gone wild, . . .88 
Hickory tribe, . . . .109 
Honeysuckle, . 60 


Indian uses of plants, 26, 38, 
71, 80, 81, 84, 95, 100, 
105, 109, 1 18, 122 

Jack-in-the-pulpit, . . .37 

Ladies’ tresses, . . .99 

Lanes of Autumn, . .105 


Lily, blackberry . . .73 
Lily, water.72 

Meadow lark, . 43 

“ palimpsest, . .58 
Milkweed, blossoms . .75 
“ climbing . .13 


Earthworms, 






















Page 

Mints, wild.54 

Mosquitoes,.39 

Mulberries,.62 

Nettles, .46 

Night-blooming flowers, 95 
November woods, 113, 114 

Nut-hatch,.11 5 

Nuts in the nursery, . . 69 
“ “ autumn, . , .109 

Oaks, .27, 99 

Orchid, earliest ... .48 


“ last of the year . 99 
t( winter persisting 113 
Owl’s table manners, . 116 

Paulo wnia,.122 

Perfumes, wild . . . . 98 

Persimmon, . . . .107 

Pine barrens in winter, 

16, 123 


Pines,.39 

Pinkster flower, . . . 47 

Pipsissewa,.116 


Pokeweed, . . . . .104 
Preacher-in-the-pulpit, . 48 
Prickly pear, . . . .117 

Quaker ladies, . . . .37 

Rainy days outdoors, . .57 
Rattlesnake plantain, .113 


Page 

River-side in spring, . .50 
t( (( flowers, . 50, 80 


Rose, musk.82 

Rose, wild . . . 59, 118 

Sassafras, . 112 

Skunk cabbage, 11 

Sleep of plants^ . . . .76 
Smells of crushed plants, 89 

Smilax,.17 

Sneezeweed, .... 104 


Soap by the road, . . .58 
Sounds of summer night, 90 


Spring beauty, . . . .26 

Spring heralds, . . . .22 

Star-of-Bethlehem, . . 49 
Sticktights, . , . .108 
Stoneroot, '. # # . 95 

Sugarberry,.106 

Sugar maple,.44 

Sumac for indoor adorn¬ 
ment, .122 

Swamp plants, . 96 

Sweet flag, . . ,50 


Thoroughwort, . 83 

Toad, Bufo the . . . .56 

Tobacco plant, . . 94 

Tree blossoms, . 42 

Trees, glory of spring 
foliage.43 


















Trees, seed vessels 

122 

“ winter buds . 

. 120 

Tuckahoe, 

. . 7 i 

Tulip-tree. 

. 45 

Violet, dog’s tooth 

. . 34 

" earliest . . , 

. . 3 i 

Wakerobin, 

. . 33 


Whisky Run, . . . .54 

Whitlow grass, . . . .24 

Whitsuntide woods, . .47 

Winter buds, . 118, 120 

Wood robins, . . , .65 

Woodlands in March, . 25 
“ in November, 

113» "4 

Wood’s edge, flowers of 68 



























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OCT 18 1911 




CHARGE FOR OVER-DETENTION TWO CENTS A DAY 
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50M-P. L. 134-1-12-10 

PUBLIC library 


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MX. 


WASHINGTON, D. C. 


...S.a88.5 w 



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however caused, must be promptly adjusted by 
the person to whom the book is charged. . 

Fine for over detention, two cents a day (Sun¬ 
days excluded). 

Books will be issued and received from 9 a. m. 
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